Hi,

Is discovery of ESXi hosts possible? I presume with the regular ESX you are making use of the “customised” RHEL service console and SSH access? In ESXi it is possible to enable SSH but it’s not supported by VMware, that and the service console is very slim indeed with ESXi so possibly the commands you want wouldn’t be available anyway.

I can’t see any SNMP settings in vSphere client for any of my ESXi hosts, again I’d presume that with full-fat ESX this would be handled with net-SNMP via the service console…

Any ideas?

Ta,

Jon.

Welcome Jon

This thread should just about cover it.

We can use SSH in the current product for ESX up to version 3.5

To my knowledge if you enable SSH access on ESXi/vSphere the SSH discovery generally works, though I am aware this is not a support config by VMWare and it’s not a long term solution.

Okay so I enabled SSH and gave it a go, we are using ESXi 4.0 hosts. Login attempts from Discovery fail with the following message:

unix login – Unknown OS type for uname output ‘VMkernel <my.host.name> 4.0.0 #1 SNMP Release build-208167 Nov 8 2009 01:02:11 ×86_64 unknown’

So although my Discovery task can login to the host and start gathering information it doesn’t seem to be compatible with ESXi 4.0, I do have 3.5 hosts but not on this particular LAN so not readily available for testing

Thanks for the feedback Jon. I take it from your use of terminology you are user of the earlier versions of ADDM? I just wanted to make sure you were actually using an ADDM 8.x release as our technology has Discovery Runs that are comparable but not identical to the Discovery Tasks in ADDM 7.x and earlier.

Also just to clarify you are looking at logging into the physical host and not one of the hosted VMs?

We’re using ADDM 8.1, maybe I am getting the terminology mixed up :)

And yes, I have enabled SSH on the physical ESXi hosts, and I tried a discovery (run?) against these. All my actual VMs are discovered correctly, but since these are just regular Windows & Linux installs I didn’t expect any issues there.

Ta,

Jon.

Following up on this I no longer think discovery will behave properly on ESXi even if ssh is enabled.

I think the reports I had from the field had got garbled between the (helpfully) similar versions in the ESX vs ESXi lines :(