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VMware

VMware ESXi

Introduction

The VMware esx-probe uses the VMware API to monitor VMware ESXi hosts.

Features

THe ESXi probe can be used to monitor standalone VMware ESXi hosts as hosts part of a VMware V-center deployment.

We have a default label that contains specific conditions for monitoring stand alone ESXi hosts.

See our overall VMwware documentation for additional information.

  • Configuration issues
  • Hypervisor status
  • Datastores
    • Virtual datastore provisioning
      Rules screenshot datastore provisioning
      • Actual capacity on the datastore
      • Virtual capacity space actual virtually provisioned when using thin provisioning.

VMware guest monitoring

We offer a specific probe for VMware guest monitoring to retrieve even more in-depth metrics per virtual machine. See our VMware guest documentation for more information.

Deployment

The Vmware ESXi probe can easily be deployed using our appliance manager.

Configuration

Credentials

The VMware API requires a user account which is assigned the Read-only rol on each monitored ESXi host.

See the VMware documentation on how to setup a local account and assign this accountto the Read-only role.

The corresponding infrasonar.yaml 1 section when using for example infrasonar as user id looks as follows:

esx:
  config:
    username: infrasonar
    password: "some_secure_passw0rd"

Don't use root

We strongly advise setting up a separate user for monitoring to have a clear separation of responsibilities but also to avoid lock-out issues.

Operational

Known issues

Cached API response

Sometimes InfraSonar reports different values than VMware consoles.

The cause for this is that the VMware API sends cached data as a response to queries.

The solution to mitigate this situation is to clean the VMware cache using the following commands on the affected ESXi host:

localcli hardware ipmi sel clear
etc/init.d/sfcbd-watchdog restart
etc/init.d/hostd restart
etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Additional information

esx probe source code

  1. Passwords are encrypted on the appliance the moment the file is saved, see our credentials documentation ↩