Hi all-
I've read through many posts detailing bits and pieces of the answer to my question, but I wanted to pose it wholly in order to make sure I understand, and see if anyone can suggest any other options.
We deploy lots of separate, sandboxed projects with a few WinSvr2008R2 boxes and typically one instance of ESXi 5.1. All are Dell R710/R720 servers. We also include a Solarwinds NPM instance in each one of these systems. I've discovered that I'm able to monitor the hardware health (CPU, Disks, Memory, PSUs, etc.) of the Windows boxes using Universal Device Pollers, polling the Dell OpenManage instances on these machines via SNMP and getting back raw values in return. I just get a rudimentary table of values from each UDP, but that's enough to be satisfactory. However, it does not appear that I will be able to do the same for the ESXi box, correct? It appears that VMWare has removed the necessary support for hardware health via SNMP 'get's (polling), and only supports either SNMP traps or the CIM protocol. Is this correct?
I see a lot of references that ESXi 5+ does include a fully featured SNMP agent, but it requires a lot of set up. I'm also unclear if this agent will play nicely with OpenManage, and actually respond to requests from the Dell-specific hardware OIDs.
I realize that the Solarwinds SAM product is more suited to this application, and in fact I've got it working well on another testbed. However, we've got one system that we have not been able to purchase a SAM license for, only NPM, and I'd like to be 100% positive I can't work out some kind of solution using only NPM.
Thanks for your help!
Colin
