Setup: We have over 80 ESX hosts managed by 2 vCenters discovered in solarwinds via the vCenter API integration (The recommended setup). We receive SNMPv3 traps only from the vCenters and have the ESX hosts as ping only nodes for node down alerting, etc. Our server team performs upgrades and patches in groups of ESX hosts.
Question: Does anyone have a similar setup and if so, how do you initiate a maintenance window for just one ESX hosts; or even more than one?
More Details:
We can't place any ESX hosts in maintenance mode (in solarwinds) because the vCenters will continue to send traps and solarwinds will continue to generate alerts based on those traps.
We can't place the ESX hosts in maintenance mode (in vCenter) because things like vmotion start occurring which we do not want.
We can't place the vCenters themselves in maintenance mode (in solarwinds) because then we potentially miss events from other ESX hosts not currently being worked on.