EMC Ionix: Enabling ESM SNMP Polling

Abstract:

In a converged world of EMC, who purchased SMARTS and VMWare, bundling various vendors into a single Ionix umbrella - functionality is slowly being hidden and removed, making managed services and enterprise management more difficult from a standards perspective. The ESM / EISM or Server Monitoring product is the latest product to start being dumbed-down by EMC.

The History:

With ESXi being a product of VMWare and VMWare being owned by EMC, the combined company offers a different management solution called VirtualCenter, which is highly proprietary. VirtualCenter is not an Managed Services grade product, able to run under multiple operating system platforms. The EISM or ESM product has traditionally been cross-platform, enabling Managed Service providers to manage servers, hypervisors, and applications processes all from a highly scalable central platform.

The Problem:

EMC is starting the process of crippling managed services products in their portfolio, so enterprise products can be emphasized through it's VMWare subsidiary, and additional tools (which were formerly not required for monitoring) would be a required purchased product.

By default, in recent versions of EMC Ionix ESM (or EISM) - the Server Monitoring solution - VMWare required Virtual Center to manage ESXi platforms, out of the box.

The Solution:

For Managed Service Providers, this is not an optimal solution. To revert back to the "standards" based methodology of managing servers - SNMP VMWare Discovery can be re-enabled manually.

sun9999/root$ cd /opt/InCharge8/ESM/smarts/bin
sun9999/root$ sm_edit conf/esm/DISCOVERY_VMWARE.import

#----- Register VMware VCenter Probe with TopologyManager-------#
ICF_TopologyManager::ICF-TopologyManager
{
# We get ASL error 'duplicate row' when we try to add a row again.
# To avoid this ASL error, first remove (we don't get ASL error if not found)
# a row then add it later.
types -= { "VCenterDiscovery","Java Probe to Discover VMware VCenter" }
types += { "VCenterDiscovery","Java Probe to Discover VMware VCenter" }
}

Remember to restart the ESM domain manager upon completion.