Monitoring Vsphere4 vith SPI nworks 4.5

[cptsly]

Hi guys,
Do you know if nworks 4.5 supports Vsphere/ESXi4?

Thank!

[Nick.Kordich]

Hello,

You'll need version 5.x to monitor vSphere 4. The version of the VI API used in the 4.5 collector was largely forward compatible, but there are a couple of issues that you would cause problems communicating to the new verison of vCenter. In addition to changes to the API, there were changes to the VC messages, such that you'll want to update your vCenter event monitoring policies, if you have customized them.

Regards,
Nick K.

[cptsly]

Hi,
We are currently using nworks to monitor all Vcenter's critical alerts. As we are going forward to move to vcenter4 (and esxi 4), but don't have time right now to upgrade nworks to v5 (will be a separated project for us), will our current version be able to continue monitoring same alerts or will it not work anymore?

thx

[arseny]

Hello,

The format of events streamed from vCenter changed in vSphere, compared to Virtual Infrastructure, and many other new events appeared. Also, there were new objects added to topology (i.e. VMware vApps), so using your current monitoring infrastructure on nworks 4.5 with vSphere is a risk of monitoring noise and corrupted service-layer representation.

Upgrade to nworks v5 would take you no longer than several hours in a side-by-side scenario, and it's recommended to align finish-to-start relationship from nworks upgrade to vSphere deployment project, for the benefits of Operations team.

Cheers,

[cptsly]

Well, let me ask it another way( I already have licences for nworks 5, but really don't have time to migrate now). Is there somewhere where I can find a list of what I'll be able to monitor with nworks 4.5 on ESXi4? (HP OV 7.5)

thx

[Alec King]

Hi,

I'm afraid I have to confirm - you really need to upgrade to nworks 5. Version 4 of nworks does not support vCenter 4 / ESXi4.

You will find that, yes, in nworks 4 you are able to create a connection to vCenter 4.
You would probably see some performance metrics and some events coming through.

But -
* you would miss many events, because the format of many event messages changed (therefore our v4 pattern-matching event policies would not work). Many events would fall to catch-all.
* you would not get new events, for example on fault-tolerant VMs and other new vCenter 4 features.
* if you created new topology objects such as Virtual Application (vApp), then this would break the nworks Collector topology-generation, probably causing all collection of data to fail.

Definitely recommend that you upgrade to nworks 5, if you now have a vCenter 4 environment.
The upgrade process really is not too complicated - and the new features of License Server, and automatic load-balanced monitoring job allocation, mean that v5 is much easier to set up and administer.
Let us know if we can help,
Regards