Status of ESX host services

[spasq01]

Nagios is running on a VM and is running version 2009R1.2. My ESX servers run on HP blades (BL 465c) running vsphere. The ESX servers and the nagios vm are on the same subnet. The interconnect bays on the blade chassis has cisco 3020 catalyst switches and Brocade fiber switches.

[mmestnik]

That's about what I suspected, though I was unaware that VMWare had a cloud OS.

This wizard should have been called EXS3i instead of VMWare, though that's not to say with a few modifications it couldn't do vSphere. We don't have a testing environment nor any experience with this product. If you could help us understand the difference that would help us to produce a better VMWare wizard.

We opted to deploy op5's check_esx3 Nagios Plugin, I'd imagine despite it's name that using the Datacenter options that it should operate on vSphere for you.

[Box293]

A quick summary of VMware products.

ESX is the name given to the VMware OS that provides bare metal virtualisation.
Versions available are 2, 3.x and 3.5.x.

vSphere is the replacement name for ESX.
Currently the version is 4.x

VirtualCenter is the application that is used to manage all the ESX hosts. This has since been renamed to vCenter.
Versions available are 2.x, 2.5.x and 4.x

When ESX 3.0 was released, VirtualCenter 2.0 was released. These two products are the key components of the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Family.

WhenESX 4.0 was released, VirtualCenter 4.0 was released (a version number was skipped to keep things simple). These two products are the key components of the VMware vSphere Family.

The ESX / vSphere OS runs on a cut down Linux OS. This is what they call the service console. The service console is where you can install third party applications like Dell OpenManage software, UPS software etc.

The ESX(i) and vSphere(i) OS is a version that has no service console. So things like the Dell OpenManage components cannot be installed on the server. This makes the OS itself very small, 20MiB from memory. This allows you to boot the server from an SD card and removes the need to purchase a host with internal hard disks if it is going to be connected to a SAN. The i version is also free to use (until you want to do things like vMotion etc).

Because of the lack of a service console, not all utilities to check VMware products work with the i version.

I am a VMware VCP 3 and 4 so if you have any questions about this stuff please do not hessitate to ask.