We’ve setup a number of vCentre credentials within our appliance and have been happily discovering ESX hosts managed by the respective vCentre servers without a problem. However, we have noticed that we are unable to discover a number of our ESX (3.5) servers in a particular network segment using the vCentre credential.

When I test the vCentre credential against the individual IP addresses of these servers it passes, but when I try to discover the servers the credential never appears to be used, instead they are skipped with the system reporting that they are unsupported devices (they are Dell PowerEdge 2950s which we have discovered elsewhere). If I don’t add the IPs of these servers to the list of IPs to exclude from PING, the discovery fails on No Access.

I don’t seem to have ICMP or SSH access to these servers due to the network segment they’re in, but I was under the impression that all of the information about them would be discovered from the vCentre server configured in the vCentre credential? The vCentre credentials section states that ‘Requests for information about the endpoint hosts will be routed via the VirtualCenter Server listed under “vCenter IP Address”.’

Do the usual network ports for discovery need to be open between the discovery appliance & the server endpoints when discovering using a vCentre credential?