Virtualization Support in Dell Management Console

Virtualization Support in Dell Management Console Dell Technical White Paper By Rajaneesh Shresta, Nilesh Bagad, Manoj Poonia Dell Product Group - Enterprise 1

THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. Dell, the DELL logo, PowerEdge, PowerVault, and Dell EqualLogic are trademarks of Dell, Inc.; Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. EMC, CLARiiON, and UltraFlex are trademarks or registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell. 2

Revision History Revision Date Editor Comments 1.0 07/17/09 Raj Shresta / Nilesh Initial Version Bagad 2.0 03/22/2010 Manoj Poonia Updated various other details for DMC 1.1. Added Before we Begin, Supported Virtualized OS, Features Supported, Prerequisites, Various ways to discover ESXi sections. 3

Table of Contents REVISION HISTORY...3 TABLE OF CONTENTS...4 INTRODUCTION...5 BEFORE WE BEGIN...5 HOW TO INSTALL ESX/ESXI OPERATING SYSTEM ON DELL POWEREDGE SERVERS?...5 HOW TO INSTALL DELL SYSTEM MANAGEMENT APPLICATION ON ESX/ESXI?...5 HOW TO ENABLE SNMP ON ESX CLASSIC?...5 HOW TO SET SNMP TRAP DESTINATION ON ESXI?...5 HOW TO ENABLE CIM PROVIDERS ON ESXI TO WORK WITH DMC?...5 VMWARE RELATED LINKS...6 HOW TO BE SURE THAT NOW MY ESXI BOX IS READY TO BE DISCOVERED IN DMC?...6 HOW TO BE SURE THAT NOW MY ESX CLASSIC BOX IS READY TO BE DISCOVERED IN DMC?...6 WHAT HAPPENS IF OMSA IS NOT INSTALLED ON MY VIRTUALIZED HOST SYSTEM?...7 WHAT S THE IMPACT OF ESXI S LOCKDOWN MODE ON DMC?...7 SUPPORTED VIRTUALIZED OPERATING SYSTEMS...7 DMC 1.1 SUPPORTED VIRTUALIZED OPERATING SYSTEMS...7 FEATURES SUPPORTED...8 PREREQUISITES...9 SUPPORTED PROTOCOLS TO DISCOVER VIRTUALIZED OPERATING SYSTEMS...9 PREREQUISITES FOR CLASSIC ESX...9 PREREQUISITES FOR HYPER-V/HYPER-V SERVER...9 PREREQUISITES FOR EMBEDDED ESX (ESXI)...10 VARIOUS WAYS TO DISCOVER ESXI...10 DISCOVERY AND CLASSIFICATION...13 DISCOVERY OF VIRTUAL MACHINES (GUESTS)...13 HOST-GUEST ASSOCIATION...14 USER INTERFACE...15 INVENTORY...16 HARDWARE INVENTORY FOR HOST...16 HARDWARE INVENTORY FOR VIRTUAL MACHINES...16 REPORTS...21 RIGHT CLICK ACTIONS...22 ALERTS...23 REFERENCES...25 4

Introduction The purpose of this document is to describe virtualization support in Dell Management Console (DMC) v1.1 and onwards. Support for Virtualization servers in DMC is defined as support for the Discovery and Classification, Inventory including identification of guest VMs and health monitoring. More details about the features are in the following sections below: Note: This document only pertains to the management of virtualized systems, not what DMC may itself be installed on. Before We Begin How to install ESX/ESXi Operating System on Dell PowerEdge Servers? Refer Deployment guides. These will help you to understand the minimum hardware requirements and recommendations to install these operating systems on the Dell Hardware. How to install Dell System Management Application on ESX/ESXi? Refer System Management Guides. These will help you to install various Dell OpenManage System management applications (like Dell OpenManage Server Administrator OMSA). How to enable SNMP on ESX Classic? By default SNMP is disabled on ESX 4.0 Classic, which is supported and required for DMC. Follow the instructions given in SNMP on ESX Classic 4 whitepaper to enable SNMP and set trap destination for DMC to discover ESX classic and receive SNMP traps coming from it. How to set SNMP trap destination on ESXi? You can use VMware remote command line (RCLI) to set the SNMP trap destination on ESXi. VMWare RCLI can be installed from the VMWare website. Refer SNMP on ESX Classic 4 whitepaper for the command syntax and various other details. Sample syntax given here: vicfg-snmp.pl --server <ESXi_IP> --username root --password <Password> -c <ESX_Community> -t <DMC_IP>@162/<DMC_SNMP_CommunityString> Or you can edit the /etc/vmware/snmp.xml configuration file manually on the ESXi box, using the unsupported shell. How to enable CIM Providers on ESXi to work with DMC? Follow the instructions given in ESXi Setup in DMC whitepaper to enable CIM providers to discover ESXi. This will also help you guide importing multiple Certificates and enabling CIM profiles to work with DMC. 5

VMWare Related Links Follow the link to get documents on VMWare Software for Dell PowerEdge Servers. Also, VMWare related tools can be installed from the VMWare official website or you can launch (once ESXi installed) http://<esxihostname>/ URL. How to be sure that now my ESXi box is ready to be discovered in DMC? You can install WinRM 1.1/2.0 on your management station box and run the following commands to connect to remote ESXi box to verify the results. Note: - -skiprevocationcheck tag will work when you have WinRM 2.0. - Copy the command to a notepad, replace the dummy variables with proper ones and execute the command. 1) If the below command succeeds, that means DMC is able to connect to this box (unless there is no problem later on). C:\> winrm e http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cimschema/2/root/cim_computersystem -r:https://<esxi_ip>/wsman -u:<user> - p:<password> -auth:basic -skipcacheck -skipcncheck -encoding:utf-8 skiprevocationcheck 2) Check the result for the following command which gives Host and its Virtual Machines related information. It will return you VMWARE_ESXComputerSystem (Host) and VMWARE_VMComputerSystem (guest virtual machines) information. You can also use this command to cross verify whether the number of VMs discovered are same as that returned by this command. C:\>winrm e http://schemas.dmtf.org/wbem/wscim/1/cimschema/2/root/vmware/esxv2/cim_computersystem? cimnamespace=vmware/es xv2 -r:https://<ip>/wsman -u:<username> -p:<password> -auth:basic - skipcacheck -skipcncheck -encoding:utf-8 -skiprevocationcheck 3) Other classes under /root/cimv2 namespace will provide the most of the inventory details. You can run commands for those and verify the results. How to be sure that now my ESX Classic box is ready to be discovered in DMC? DMC supports ESX Classic using SNMP protocol. By default SNMP could be disabled, so first you need to enable it. Then use any SNMP tool to do a get/walk for the followings OIDs: VMWare: For host/guest information. Host: 1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.1 Guest Virtual Machines: 1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.2.1 Dell OpenManage Server Administrator/Agent: For classifying the device as Dell Computer and fetching the hardware information. 1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892 6

If both these SNMP OIDs returns values, then Host should be properly discovered in the DMC and classified as Dell Computer, also its Virtual machines will be discovered (if host discovery was performed) and associated to it. What happens if OMSA is not installed on my virtualized Host system? Without OMSA presence, Host will be discovered as Computer instead of Dell Computer. And the extended management console functionalities like hardware inventories, various task executions would not be applicable for Computer classified devices. If you have enabled SNMP on ESX Classic box, DMC will discover it as Computer and place it under Servers group. All VMs will also be discovered and associated to the Host. What s the impact of ESXi s lockdown mode on DMC? Refer VMWare documents to know more about ESXi and Lockdown mode (Search on VMWare). Briefly: Lockdown mode prevents remote personnel from logging in to the ESXi host by using the root login name. When lockdown mode is enabled, you can create a user with administrator privileges to connect to a standalone host. If lockdown mode is enabled on ESXi box, then you will not be able to manage the host device (using root login name) using DMC. So, while discovering ESXi in DMC, ensure that: - Proper credentials are used in the connection profile, which ESXi allows for remote management. Try executing the WinRM command to verify this behavior. - Lockdown mode disabled on the ESXi box. Once ESXi host gets discovered, and later if lockdown mode is enabled on the managed ESXi box, then you may see impact on the health status of ESXi box in DMC, re-discovery, re-inventory etc. Supported Virtualized Operating Systems Refer the latest DMC support matrix and User guides to know the supported Virtualized Operating System by the latest version of DMC (for both as a Management Station, and managed nodes). DMC 1.1 Supported Virtualized Operating Systems Operating System Supported? Virtualization VMware ESX 3.5 Update 4 Yes (Only SNMP Supported) (OMSA Required for hardware inventory) VMware ESX 3.5i Update 4 (Flash and HDD) Limited Support* (Only WSMAN Supported) 7

(OMSA Required For Health Monitoring) VMware ESX 4.0 Gold VMware ESXi 4.0 Gold (Flash and HDD) Citrix Xenserver 4.1 (Flash and HDD) Microsoft Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V Server Limited Support* (Only SNMP Supported) (OMSA Required for hardware inventory) Limited Support* (Only WSMAN Supported) (OMSA Required For Health Monitoring) Limited Support* (Only SNMP Supported) (Only Host discovery, No VM support) (OMSA Required for hardware inventory) Yes (SNMP and WMI Supported) (Guest discovered only using WMI) (OMSA Required for hardware inventory) Yes (SNMP and WMI Supported) (Guest discovered only using WMI) (OMSA Required for hardware inventory) *Limited Support: Only the features supported by the Dell OpenManage agent (Server Administrator) Discovery, Inventory, Event Formatting, and Monitoring are supported on these operating systems. Features that require the Altiris Agent Agent Deploy, Patch Management, and Performance Monitoring on Linux Systems are not supported. Note: 1. All DMC supported features on Windows are also supported on Hyper-V Server. 2. All DMC Supported features on Linux are also supported on ESX Classic. Features supported Brief table is as follows which shows various DMC features supported by DMC 1.1. Discovery Prerequisite: OMSA Installed on remote box. Hardware Inventory Prerequisite: OMSA Installed Health Monitoring Prerequisite: OMSA Installed Reports Prerequisite: Discovery done Application Launch Prerequisite: Discovery done Hyper-V ESX Classic ESXi Xen-Server Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Alerts Yes Yes Yes Yes Out of Band Patch Management Prerequisite: Discovery, Inventory 8

In Band Patch Management Prerequisite: Discovery, Inventory, Altiris Agent OMSA Deployment Prerequisite: Discovery, Altiris Agent Performance/Power Monitoring Prerequisite: Discovery, Altiris Agent* Limited Support*. These features require Altiris Agent to be present. Please check that Altiris Agent is supported on the supported version of Virtualization Operating Systems. For example: ESX Classic and Hyper-V Server supports Altiris agent, so will support these features. Refer Dell User Guide for details. ESX 4.0 and ESXi do not, so features not supported. Refer Monitoring Section in DMC User Guide to know Operating System and Performance/Power attribute specific details supported. Prerequisites This section will help you to understand prerequisites to discover various virtualized operating system in Dell Management Console. Also refer to Configuring Discovery and Inventory Settings section in DMC user guide for details on using various protocols and perform discovery of various devices. Also refer Before we Begin section to complete some of these prerequisites for the below mentioned virtualized operating systems. Supported protocols to discover Virtualized Operating Systems DMC supports below protocols to discover various virtualized operating systems. You need to ensure that the connection profile which is used in the discovery task (to discover these boxes) has the specific protocols enabled and proper credentials are used. HyperV ESX Classic Embedded Xen-Server ESX (ESXi) SNMP Yes Yes - Yes (No Guest Information Exposed) WMI Yes - - - (Guest Information available) WSMAN - - Yes - Prerequisites for Classic ESX The host discovery will be performed using SNMP. 1. SNMP service is enabled on the host server. 2. OMSA is installed on the Host server. 3. In DMC, SNMP protocol is enabled in the connection profile (CP) that is used in discovery task to discover host. And SNMP community name provided in the CP match that of the host. Prerequisites for Hyper-V/Hyper-V Server The host can be discovered using SNMP or WMI. Hardware inventory of the Host can be collected using SNMP or WMI with OMSA installed on host. 9

Note: The host and the Virtual machines (Guest VM running on host) information will be collected using WMI provider. SNMP does not expose guest VMs information, so if SNMP was used to discover host, guest VMs will not be discovered. 1. SNMP/WMI service is enabled on the host server. 2. OMSA is installed on the host server. 3. In DMC, SNMP/WMI protocol is enabled in the connection profile that is used in the discovery task. And proper credentials (in case of WMI) and matching community string (in case of SNMP) are used. Prerequisites for Embedded ESX (ESXi) The host discovery will be performed using the CIM providers provided by VMware. 1. WSMAN service is enabled on the host server. 2. In DMC, WSMAN protocol is enabled in the connection profile that is used in the discovery task. 3. Refer to Using DMC to Manage VMWare ESXi Servers white paper for more information on configuring WSMAN protocol for ESXi server. Note: Please refer to the References for more information on: Supported system management standards (SNMP, CIM) in ESX/ESXi/Hyper-V Supported OMSA versions for ESX/ESXi/Hyper-V Unsupported features in OMSA for ESXi Configuring OMSA/SNMP for ESX/ESXi Various ways to discover ESXi Before you discover ESXi and its guest virtual machines in DMC follow this section to know how many ways you can configure your connection profile to discover it in DMC. ESXi can be discovered in the following ways. Snapshots show the connection profile and WSMAN protocol selected in various ways to discover ESXi host and its virtual machines. 1. Secure Port: By default ESXi supports https based secured mode (443 Port). To discover ESXi in secure mode, you should have valid CA certificates. These will be required to import those in DMC and ESXi to discover them using WSMAN protocol. 2. Secure with Self signed Certificates: If you do not have valid certificates, but have Self Signed Certificates specific to the ESXi box, then you can use that self signed certificate to discover that particular ESXi box. Self signed certificate from one box, may not work for another. 10

3. Secure and trusted: If you want to ignore the certificate to discover ESXi boxes in DMC, then check the Trusted Site check box under WSMAN protocol and do not provide the certificate. You have to use 443 port as a secure port. 11

4. HTTP Based discovery: If you want to discover ESXi boxes using http, then follow the DMC User Guide instructions to enable http mode on ESXi box and then discover it in DMC. 12

Discovery and Classification Discovery of Virtual Machines (Guests) Virtual machines can be discovered in two ways: 1. Through discovery of host server which stores information of all the VMs present on it. In this case even the VMs that are powered off will get discovered and correlated to host server. You need to only provide IP/Hostname of the VM Server (Host) in the discovery task and select the proper connection profile having supported protocol enabled in it. 2. Independently (Host and its Guest virtual machines) over the network. Make sure that SNMP or WMI service is enabled on guest OS and the corresponding IP address is included in the discovery range of network discovery task. You need to provide all the IPs of Host and its virtual machine to discover in the same discovery task and ensure the supported protocols are enabled in the associated connection profile. 13

Host-Guest association Once discovery is done, host and guest are classified and associated to each other and displayed under Manage All Devices group. Also refer User Interface to know about the host and guests presentation. Virtual host server will be identified based on the hypervisor OS they are running. Virtual host servers will be shown in All Devices tree under Servers Group and classified as Dell Computer. A host s IP/Hostname named group will be created under All Devices Virtual Servers. Clicking on that will show its Virtual Machines on the right hand side pane. The association between host and virtual machines running on it will be created post discovery using the MAC address, IP address and UUID of virtual machines. Once discovery task is complete, this association takes few minutes to complete. Virtual Machines running on particular host will be discovered as Virtual Machine and can be seen under All Devices Virtual Serves <Host_IP/HostName> group. The same virtual machines can be seen under All Devices Unknown group. Figure 1: Screenshot showing Classic ESX host server (with two guest machines) and Hyper-V Server (with one guest machine) Figure 2: Screenshot showing Classic ESX host server (with two guest machines) 14

Figure 3: Screenshot showing Hyper-V Server (with one guest machine) User Interface 1. Host Servers: A supported virtualized host server will be discovered and classified as Dell Computer. A new node/organization group with the Host Server s IP Address/HostName will be created under Virtual Servers. For example: Figure 2 shows when a Classic ESX Host Server was discovered, a new node under Virtual Servers got created named localhost.localhost which has two virtual machines/guests running on it, showed on the right hand side when selected the ESX host node. Host Server can be seen as Dell Computer under All Devices Servers group. 2. Virtual/Guest Machines: VMs associated to a host will be shown on the right hand side pane in the All Devices page when user clicks the host server in the left hand side organizational view. VMs will also appear under computer section of All Devices organizational view (Figures 1-3). The virtualized servers are also displayed under Computer section in the Default organizational view (Figure 12). Virtual machines, which do not support OMSA (Server Administrator Hardware Agent), will be classified as Virtual Machines. These can be seen under the respective Host Group (under Virtual Servers ) or under All Devices Unknown device group. 3. Hardware Inventory for host or virtual machine can be seen in the resource manager s Summary Hardware Summary section (Figures 4-11). 15

Figure 12: Manage -> All Resources showing all the virtual machines discovered in the console Inventory Hardware Inventory for Host Refer Discovery and Classification section to know about discovery. Inventory requires discovery to be done first and uses same connection profile (used in discovery task) to pull hardware inventory of the managed node. The various details for Classic ESX, Hyper-V Server and Embedded ESX (ESXi) are same as given in the above section. Note: OMSA should be installed on the host to provide hardware inventory. In case of ESXi, OMSA presence will classify the host as Dell Computer. Various snapshots will help you understand the inventory details which are fetched for each type of virtualized host. Hardware Inventory for Virtual Machines Hardware inventory is not supported for the Virtual Machines (Guests) which are running on top of the Host. This is because hardware information comes from Dell OpenManage Server Administrator/Agent, which can not be installed on Virtual machines. 16

Figure 4: Hardware summary of Classic ESX host server (contd ) Figure 5: Hardware summary of Classic ESX host server (contd ) 17

Figure 6: Hardware summary of Classic ESX host server Figure 7: Hardware summary of ESXi server (contd ) 18

Figure 8: Hardware summary of ESXi server Figure 9: Hardware summary of Hyper-V Server (contd ) 19

Figure 10: Hardware summary of Hyper-V Server (contd ) Figure 11: Hardware summary of Hyper-V Server 20

Reports There are two predefined Dell Reports which will help you to generate reports against discovered Host and their virtual machines. You can generate more customized reports as well. Refer DMC User Guide for that. These reports can be accessed from: Reports -> All Reports -> Dell Reports in the DMC console. 1. Virtualization Hosts: Shows virtualization capable servers that DMC has discovered. Figure 13: Virtualization Hosts report showing three host servers (Classic ESX, Embedded ESX & Hyper-V) 2. Virtual Machines: Shows list of all the virtual machines (guest machines) discovered by DMC. 21

Figure 14: Virtual Machines report showing three guest machines (two running on Classic ESX Host server & one on Hyper-V) Right click actions You can do right click on a discovered Virtual Host system and select Management Applications submenu item to do/launch the supported right click actions for it. DMC has some pre-defined right click actions for various virtualized OS but you can also generate/create new right click actions. Refer DMC Help to know more about Right Click actions. Below snapshots shows right click actions supported on various virtualized host servers: Figure 15: Right click actions on Classic ESX server Figure 16: Right click actions on ESXi server 22

Figure 17: Right click actions on Hyper-V server Alerts DMC Supports both SNMP and Monitoring related Alerts for the virtualized operating system. You can configure both host and its virtual machine to send SNMP traps to the DMC system. - SNMP Traps are received from the host machine and displayed in the Event console. Dell Server agent does not support WMI events and WSMAN indications. Guest machines can also send SNMP traps to DMC. - DMC Monitor solution alerts are generated for the supported metrics only on the host servers. Please refer Monitoring and Alerting section in DMC user guide for information on DMC Monitor solution alerts. 23

Figure 18: Monitoring Alerts for ESXi host server in the Event Console An undetermined DMCMonitor solution alert indicates that, DMC console is unable to determine the primary health for the device due to any of the following reasons: Agent (OMSA) that provides health information is not running on the system. DMC cannot communicate (via WS-MAN/SNMP/WMI) to the device. 24

Figure 19: Details of a DMC Monitor solution undetermined alert for ESXi host server indicating the system (Primary health) is in unknown state. References 1. DMC User guides 2. Using DMC to Manage VMware ESXi Servers 3. To check the availability of system management standard (SNMP, CIM) and supported system (ESX/ESXi/Hyper-V) for Dell OpenManage applications refer to supported Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Compatibility guide 4. Dell OpenManage Unsupported Features on ESXi 3.5 and ESXi 4.0 5. Installing Dell OpenManage in a VMware ESX Server Software Environment. 6. Dell OpenManage With VMware ESX Installation Guide 7. DMC Troubleshooting document 25