The business need:
We have
During our meeting with our vm team management today, the question was asked about how other VIM customers handle monitoring during maintenance of their ESX environments.
The issue is that our vm team typically creates a change request and specifies the affected ESX that are to be patched, and a start & end date/time for the entire patching change.
For each ESX to be patched; the admin puts the host into maintenance mode and waits until it moves off all its VMs and actually goes into maintenance mode.
At that point, the admin manually unmanages that ESX in Orion, and begins patching or whatever hardware changes need to be performed.
As each ESX host's maintenance is completed, the VM admin takes the host back out of maintenance mode and then manually remanages the host in Orion.
The reason these unmanage/remanage actions are done individually is because the amount of time needed to get each of them to enter maintenance mode and get their patches varies by host, and they want each host to have its monitoring resumed as soon as it's maintenance is completed (not unmanaged for the duration of a five-day change).
My questions are:
How do other VIM customers deal with unmanage/remanage of their ESX during maintenance?
Can VIM (or perhaps another product like SAM) "see" the ESX go into / out of maintenance mode and use this as a trigger to unmanage/remanage the host?
We are interested in using the vCEnter API and the Orion SWIS API to automate the unmanage/remanage function dynamically, since we can't do static (pre-set) maintenance schedules for them.
