monitoring vmhba

arielook

Hello,

We have Cisco MDS switches connected to our ESXi hosts via Fibre Channel.

I am trying to create a topology map in SolarWinds that displays the connections between the ESXi hosts and the Cisco MDS switches. However, these connections are not being discovered or displayed automatically.

After reviewing SolarWinds documentation and investigating the collected data, it appears that SolarWinds does not recognize these connections as standard network interfaces because the ESXi side uses Fibre Channel storage adapters (vmhba) rather than regular network interfaces (vmnic).

Is there a supported way in SolarWinds to discover and map Fibre Channel connections, for example:

ESXi Host → vmhba → Fibre Channel → Cisco MDS port

Ideally, we would like to display these connections in an Intelligent Map or another SolarWinds topology view.

If automatic discovery is not supported, is there another recommended method to create these relationships using VMware polling, SNMP, Universal Device Pollers, custom properties, or manual/custom topology connections?

Thank you.

vinay.by

Hi @arielook

If you can't monitor it, you can't make it appear on the map. That being said if your intent is to just show the relationship on a map that's possible, you can manually add/draw a line (dummy) which represents a connection on the topology, but then you won't be really looking at its status as it's not monitored within SolarWinds.

Manual approach:

You can drag and drop dummy objects on the map, along with network elements that's available in SolarWinds and change the color of it as you wish (Be it a line which represents a connection, be it a rectangle, circle, triangle etc), this is pretty straight forward, the only problem is this cannot be automated and manual intervention is required.

Hope this helps.