Monitoring and reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V in a single System Center Operations Manager Console
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s2l
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vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by s2l »

We have to vCenters, one is a Windows box, the other the vCenter Appliance.
Both are well working with the MP throug the VMware Connection.
The Windows box is also discovered as a vCenter Server as the SCOM agent is installed on it.

If I install the agent on the vCenter Appliance, will it also be managed by the MP as a vCenter Server?

I looked through the well done documentation but without success.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by Vitaliy S. »

I don't see any reasons why it should not be discovered and managed a vCenter Server, but I will double-check with our MP experts.
s2l
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by s2l »

Thank you Vitaliy!

Looking forward for the answer.

BR
Vitaliy S.
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Just talked to our guys, and it appears that everything is not that easy as it seems to be. vCenter Server Appliance has different services and processes, so our default discovery might not be executed against this configuration. Besides, as far as I know SCOM agent supports various Linux distributions, but I'm not sure it can be installed on the vCenter Server appliance. Have you already tried to do that? Can you please let us know the results of this deployment?

Can you please describe a bit more on what you would like to monitor in the vCenter Server appliance?
Alec King
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by Alec King »

The vCenter Appliance will not appear in the 'VMware vCenter' folder of views in Veeam MP - currently that folder only shows vCenter on Windows.

However vCenter Appliance WILL be monitored - it appears as a VM. It will be in the VM views and dashboards and will get all the standard monitoring and reporting as for a VM.

Even though the Ops Mgr support for Linux might allow the Microsoft agent to be installed there - I don't think that would be officially supported by VMware.... need to check if they allow/support any 3rd party software to be installed in the appliance.

BTW in our next major MP version, we will be discovering vCenter Appliance as a 'special' kind of VM, with additional views and monitoring. It would be great to hear feedback on what extra items you would like to monitor on the vCenter Appliance!
s2l
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by s2l »

Ok thank you Alex for the accurate answer. Actually the Idea was to monitor services on vCenter like vpxd, webservices, inventory...
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Re: vCenter Appliance as vCenter

Post by Alec King »

Ah, OK - well I googled and found several tutorials on how to install software in the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance).

However this article http://www.virten.net/2013/12/howto-ins ... in-vcsa-5/ also states 'installing software in VCSA is not officially supported by VMware' - as I suspected....

So if you do install the SCOM agent for Linux there.... it would probably give you monitoring data, but you'd be at risk of being 'unsupported' by VMware if you have any issues. Overall, I'd probably not recommend it.

Please note - even though the VCSA is monitored only as a standard VM by the VEEAM MP, there are also additional rules that target the 'vCenter' object we always create in our topology (whether appliance, or windows). That's a separate object from the VCSA VM itself. And there are numerous alerts there relating to the overall health of vCenter.
So although the services you mention aren't directly monitored for VCSA, there is pretty detailed monitoring for vCenter health already in the VEEAM MP, whether appliance or windows version.
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