Monitoring ESX Servers with Zenoss

We all would have seen the millions of blogs lighting up with the Zenoss 3 native VI3 monitoring announcement.

Me, I wasn’t so interested – I’ve been using Zenoss for VMware monitoring for the best part of a year – the announcement ain’t that special. Really.

I’m going to show you how to do it though, maybe it’ll be interesting…

• Build a CentOS 5.2 x86_64 server. That’s what I used, that’s what the guide will assume. Make sure to disable the firewall and SELinux
• Run: yum -y install mysql-server net-snmp-utils gmp swig autoconf
• Run: chkconfig mysqld on ; chkconfig snmpd on ; service mysqld start ; service snmpd start
• Run: rpm -Uvh http://transact.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zenoss/zenoss-2.3.0.el5 .x86_64.rpm
• Run: rpm -Uvh http://transact.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zenoss/zenoss-core-zenp acks-2.3.0.el5.x86_64.rpm
• Run: chkconfig zenoss on; service zenoss restart

Now, lets configure Zenoss:

• Download the VMware ESX Zen Pack to your desktop as a zip
• Login to http://serverIP:8080 – username is admin, password is zenoss
• Click on Settings -> ZenPacks, then click on the down arrow next do the Loaded Zen Packs title and select Install Zen Pack and browse to the zip file in point (1)
• Then click Add Device and add an ESX Server under the Server/ESX definition.
• Once all the devices are added, click on the Devices link and edit the zProperties of every ESX device to include the root username and password in the following fields: zCommandUsername and zCommandPassword

Let’s configure each ESX server to work with Zenoss:

• Run: esxcfg-firewall -e snmpd
• Run: chkconfig snmpd on
• Run: echo “exec .1.3.6.1.4.1.6876.99999.1 vdf /usr/sbin/vdf” >> /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
• Run: service snmpd start

You should now see event data appearing on your device list.

All done

Edit: This plugin is an SNMP-only version of the monitoring for Zenoss – the Enterprise Zenoss uses a completely different plugin – it uses the VI3 SDK to monitor all objects, so if you want to pay for those features, they are worth it.

Leo