Placing Hosts in Maintenance Mode

[aperson]

When using nworks and Veeam 5.6 / SCOM 2007.

If I place a host in Maintenance Mode will the VMs that were hosted on that server also be placed into maintenance mode, therefore unmonitored until they move to an unmonitored host?

Should this happen? It looks like VMs on a Host getting maintenance may have been placed also in MM within SCOM

Any documentation?

Thanks

[Alec King]

Hi APerson,

Correct - if you place a Host in SCOM Maintenance Mode, then any VMs on that host will also go into Maintenance Mode. This is by design & how the SCOM feature works - because the VMs are contained within the Host. All contained objects go into Maintenance Mode when you put the root object into Maintenance Mode (so for example if you put a SQL Server in M-Mode, then all the Databases also go into M-Mode. Same with Host and VMs.)

I'd say if you were doing maintenance operations on a Host, wouldn't you want to vMotion the VMs to another host anyway? Or, at least power them off - so they would not be generating monitoring data in any case.

But if you do want to put just a host into Maintenance Mode, then do the following - it just takes a few extra clicks -
* right-click the host to start M-Mode
* choose the option 'selected objects only'. Now the host itself is in M-Mode.
* then go to each host container such as CPU, NETWORK, SENSORS etc and set M-Mode there. For the containers, use 'all contained objects' option. Now all host components are in M-Mode.
* do NOT set M-Mode on the 'VM' Container - that's where all the virtual machines live.

If you complete the above, you have a host and all components in M-Mode, but the VMs are not.
Hope that helps!

Regards,
Alec

[Alec King]

One final point
Take care when putting Datastores into Maintenance Mode - because if it is a shared Datastore then we only create one instance of that Datastore in SCOM (and containment relationships to all hosts)
So, if you put all Datastores on a host into M-Mode, you will be putting shared Datastores into M-Mode as well.
You may want to assign M-Mode individually to Datastores (e.g. only local Datastores, not the shared ones)

Cheers,
Alec