Monitoring VMWare ESX Hosts

PA Server Monitor monitors virtual machines (guest operating systems) as though they were physical machines.

With VMWare ESX and ESXi hosts, ESX specific credentials need to be given. And PA Server Monitor needs to know the server is ESX/ESXi so it knows to use those credentials. This is done by setting the server type.

Once the target server is marked as an ESX host, the standard Performance monitor will retrieve and monitor counters for the host's CPU and memory usage. In addition, installed and running VM counts can be monitored.

Further, SNMP can be enabled on the ESX/ESXi host so additional counters can be watched, both natively via the SNMP monitor and via the simulated counters in the Performance monitor.

To enable SNMP you need to use the vSphere Command Line interface and run the following commands:

#enable SNMP
vicfg-snmp.pl --server {server_name} --username root --password xxxxxxx -c readcommunity

#enable SNMP Trap
vicfg-snmp.pl --server {server_name} --username root --password xxxxxx -t {trap_target_server}@162/trapcommunity

#enable SNMP daemon
vicfg-snmp.pl --server {server_name} --username root --password xxxxxxxx --E

(Thanks to Mikael in Sweden for passing on this tip)

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