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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.

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.

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