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

[James Pratt]

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Steve Shipway [mailto:s.shipway at auckland.ac.nz]
>> Sent: Tuesday, January 26, 2010 3:03 AM
>> To: nccomp at gmail.com; nagios-users at lists.sourceforge.net
>> Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Virtual Machines - define as parent or
ashost
>> dependency...
>> 
>> This is the way we do it, with Parents (not host dependencies).
>> 

Hi Steve, been following this with great interest. Care to share how you
do host dep's too?, this is all very helpful, thank you! :)

>> 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.

So ultimately, the "Farm object" definition would be: the vcenter server
(with esx hosts as parents?), combined with a service check on the
vcenter service?

Not familiar with check_summary, sorry, that's next up to google. ;)

>> 
>> 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.
>> 

Yes, I feel that pain well. How can/do you keep track of what ESX hosts
are parents to what vm's when DRS is in fully-automated mode, that seems
to be the key... ? 

>> 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

Excellent - off to have a look. We use a combination of things at the
moment, including check_esx3 and also use python/WBEM & snmp on HP
hardware. 

Thanks much!

James



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