OpsMgr Agent / VM integration

[cookiemonster]

Hi all,

Spun up a test SCOM 2012 SP1 and Veeam Management Pack for VMware implementation recently. One of our goals is to provide a more holistic view (i.e. tie guest monitoring to VMware monitoring).

The documentation mentions that this functionality has a few requirements, including 'The Display Name of the virtual machine (in vCenter) must match either the NETBIOS name or the FQDN of the virtualized OS.' Is there any workaround for this? The first word of all our virtual machines is always the hostname / NETBIOS name, but we also add a space and a description of the VM, for example:

VM1133 OpsMgr MS2
VM1134 OpsMgr 2012 nworks Collector

Has anyone had any success working around this requirement? For the few VMs that are only the NETBIOS name, I get the desired results (one object with both Windows and VM info). For everything else, I get two objects, one with the full vCenter display name only showing VM info, the other with the NETBIOS name showing Windows health.

Your insight would be greatly appreciated!

[sergey.g]

Hello cookiemonster,

This is a great question. But I'm afraid that for 5.7 version of our Management Pack it's by design. The way this functionality works in 5.7, there is no way of matching a VM with the corresponding windows computer if name of the virtual machine doesn't match NETBIOS name in guest OS running inside this VM. The corresponding discovery script which is running on windows computer simply doesn't know the name of the VM and it creates a relationship with VM which has name equal to computer NETBIOS name, that's why you see two objects instead of one.

I understand that this could be inconvenient, but there is a special "Notes" section in the VI client, you could use this section for your descriptions of VMs. This would allow you to remove comments from VM name, thus enabling discovery to correctly match VMs and computers.

We are working hard to remove this limitation for our future version of Veeam Management Pack.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[cookiemonster]

Thank you for the quick response!

Regardless of whether it's best practice, our engineers and support staff have become accustomed to seeing a brief note on the functionality right in the display name.

It would be easy enough to use PowerCLI to remove those details and insert them at the start of the notes, but I don't believe we will have that flexibility unfortunately.

Here's to hoping it makes it into version 6 : )