Virtual Machines - define as parent or as host dependency...

Steve Shipway s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz
Tue Jan 26 09:03:23 CET 2010


This is the way we do it, with Parents (not host dependencies).

First we create a virtual object for the VMWare farm.  This has a status of UP if any of the farm servers are up (using check_summary).  This virtual 'host' has several services, using the v0.9 check_vmware, relating to the farm's alarms, storage volumes, etc.  These services have service dependencies on the VirtualCentre service running on the Virtual Centre host.

The Farm object has ALL of the ESX Servers as Parents.

All the VMs in the farm have the Farm object as a parent.  Some of them also use check_esx3 to alert on Alarms, CPU, and Memory usage within VMWare.

This might seem a bit complex if you've only the one server, but as soon as oyu have multiple servers in the farm, and use DRS, you have to use a farm object for parents/dependencies.

It might make more sense for these relationships to be host dependencies rather than parents i nmost cases, but we have a SAN mirrored environment to a seocnd ESX farm so that the VMs can be brought up ther ein the event of a complete farm outage, hence the use of Parents rather than dependencies.

If you have VSphere4 (ESX4.0) with a SNMP-enabled Cisco virtual switch in the farm, you could probably make the virtual switch the parent device rather than having to use a farm object.

The VMWare monitoring plugin we're using is v0.9 of check_vmware, from here: http://www.steveshipway.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1648

check_summary is available from nagiosexchange.org (as is check_esx3 which is the forerunner of check_vmware)

Steve

________________________________
From: Andrew Davis [nccomp at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, 26 January 2010 9:14 a.m.
To: nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Nagios-users] Virtual Machines - define as parent or as host dependency...

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this, yet keep things as simple as possible.

Say I have a server called Saturn running VMWare. I'm monitoring this server with Nagios.
I also have three VM's on Saturn: Jupiter, Mars, and Pluto

I want to suppress all host and service alerts on Jupiter, Mars, & Pluto if the host Saturn is down (unreachable). I do NOT want to suppress host or service alerts from Jupiter, Mars, and Pluto if the VMWare processes (services) are down on Saturn. Basically, if my VM server is completely unreachable, don't bother me about its client VM's.

Am I better off doing this with a host dependency? Something like:


define hostdependency {
        host_name                       Host B
        dependent_host_name             Host C
        notification_failure_criteria   d,u
        }


Or am I better off defining Saturn as the parent of the VM's in the host config? Something like:


define host {
        host_name               jupiter
        use                     VMs
        alias                   jupiter
        address                 172.26.251.60
        parents                 saturn, tpdmzsw1
}

I've successfully used the "parents" directive to define network topology, so I would think this would work. What might be the risks of defining both?

--


  A. Davis
  Email:     nccomp at gmail.com<mailto:nccomp at gmail.com>

  "There is no limit to what a man can accomplish
   if he doesn't care who gets the credit." - Ronald Reagan

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