Monitoring vSphere ESX server with Nagios Core

[lyle]

I want to monitor our vSphere 5.5 servers, but am still using Nagios Core (XI license, but haven't migrated), so no easy Wizard install for me.

Do I understand correctly from other posts (like http://support.nagios.com/forum/viewtop ... f=7&t=6536) that the general procedure would be:
- extract check_esx3.pl from the XI wizard and use it for a plug-in on the Core server
- install the perl prerequisites mentioned in the Wizard pdf on the Core server
- define the environmental variables
- install the latest "SDK for Perl" from VMWare onto the Core server (watch for the "Enjoy" message)

Is that about it? Some authentication must have to happen between the Nagios server and the ESX host. I see mention in some other posts of calling check_esx3 with "-f /usr/local/nagiosxi/etc/components/vmware/<hostname>_auth.txt", but haven't found any more explanation.

It would all be so simple if I could just use an nrpe client on the ESX server, but I guess that's not possible.

Thanks....Lyle

[sreinhardt]

That would sound about right. As for authentication, you can pass it directly to the plugin with arguments, or create the appropriate text file for it to import. It does not matter where you place that file, provided that nagios has read access to it. The only things I might change with your logic, would be to follow the Monitoring ESXi\vmware with nagios xi document for prereqs first, before even copying out the plugin.

As for nrpe, this "may" be possible, esxi is technically just a very stripped down RHEL install, esxi 3.x = RHEL 3, esxi 4.x = RHEL 4, but not sure what esxi 5 is, it might be rhel 5, but I have yet to confirm. If you could get build utils on esxi, you could build nrpe, alternatively if you built the nrpe client on whichever version, and statically link the dependencies it should work as well. That's a little out of our normal realm of nrpe support though, and you would have to do the same process for any binary plugins you needed.