Hi,

Thanks for the post.

OME will also list the VMs under the host server. The list location is changed from the device tree to the inventory page of the host server. If you click on the host in the device tree, you will see the list of VMs running on that host as part of inventory information. It will also show the powered on/off status of the guest at the time of inventory.

Regards

Abhijit

Yes, I realize the the VMs are listed on the info page for the ESXi hosts.  However, we still need to discover the actual VMs as devices within OME so that the SNMP alerts are recorded for these devices in an easily accessed way.  In ITA these VMs showed up with their own icon even though they were under "Unknown Devices"... at least this way they were easy to distinguish from other unknown devices.  Now under OME there is nothing to distinguish them making it harder to review the list of Unknown Devices for correctly/incorrectly inventoried systems.

Since OME is hardware management tool and all the devices in the tree are physical devices, a decision was made to not show the VMs in the tree. There was no hardware inventory for the VMs.

VMs will still show up under unknown devices.

Hello, I have a question about the VMs that do show up.    All of them show up as "health status = unknown".. Should this be?

Also, only a small fraction of them show up with the Model field having "VMware Virtual Platform" most are blank.

These would be on a mixture of ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 (latest patches)

Hi,

Thanks for your post. OME is designed to be hardware monitoring tool and it monitors the hardware health of VM host and doesn't really monitor the VM health. That is the reason, VMs are not classified as part of device tree. If you have OMSA installed on the host, you will be able to monitor the health status for the host.

Regards

Abhijit

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback. I'll definitely send the request about VMs over to marketing.

ITA did show the VMs in the tree but did not monitor VM health as there isn't a concept of hardware health information for a VM. The health was always hard coded to fixed status.

This was discussed during the design phase and since all the devices in the device tree are physical devices displaying health information and hardware inventory, it was decided to remove VMs since both of these attributes are not applicable to VMs and we are not really managing those VMs like we manage other devices.

I agree that the list of VMs running is only shown in inventory page and is causing inconvinience. Thanks for the feedback on this. We'll definitely discuss this for future releases.

Regards

Abhijit

IT Assistant had this capability; why was it not carried over?

From my perspective ignoring the VMs does not make sense.  We are a Dell shop with 100% Dell server infrastructure running mostly Windows, hundreds of instances.  Some of these instances are installed on physical hardware and some are on virtual hardware.  All are connected to our OME instance by automation.

Back on IT Assistant all of our devices whether physical or virtual were recognized allowing me to quickly and easily identify any device that was not reporting to ITA correctly.  Also, listing the VMs in a tree view below their parent physical host was a simple, elegant approach that provided useful information.

Now on OME the majority of my "Dell" server infrastructure shows up as Uknown Device simply because it is running inside a VM container.  I have no simple way of telling if the Uknown Device is a VM or is hardware that is not being inventoried correctly unless a take the time to click on each out of 100s of items.

While I would love to see detailed VM inventory information in OME I recognize this is not a focus area.  But I would like to humbly request that we at least be given back the ITA experience where VMs are actually given a different icon at the least.  For bonus points lets put them back under the hosts in the tree view.

Yeah, interesting thread.  Just like Abhijit mentioned, we got various feedback on this.  Some customers told us to remove from the tree since they are not h/w, etc., as he mentions.

Let me ask you a question:  Would you be ok if they were on a tree and we used an 'unknown' health icon for the health (since there is no h/w health on the VM)?  Would this be an improvement?

Perhaps we could make a user preference to show VMs on the tree or not....anyway, as Abhijit said, we will send over to the marketing team.

Rob

It is the icon that is the most important item to me.  The ability to have OME identify the "machine" as a VM and a way to easily see whether or not OME inventory is working for that device (even if the inventory is as simple as identifying it as a VM and then effectively ignoring it after that).

Without having a different icon for VMs the tree aspect could only be used for this if the devices are then removed from the "Uknown Devices" list leaving behind the ones that I really need to look at.

Another alternative which might provide an even better end user experience would be to allow us to identify "Uknown Devices" ourselves and remove them from this grouping by moving them to other device groups.  Actually, I would really prefer this alternative since the Uknown Devices would then simply become a list of items that need some attention one time and after that could be ignored.

Thanks again. We understand that there is definitely a value in differentiating VMs from other unknown devices. We will discuss this further for future release and try to improve the behavior.

We will also look at the unknown device group and see how it can be improved further.

Regards

Abhijit

Hi Abhijit

Did you get any feedback regarding this? I have installed OME_V1.1 and would like my VM's not to show up as unknown.

Hi there, a few quick questions.

ESX or ESXi ?

What version?

Thanks!

Rob

I have ESXi 5.1.0, 914609

Thanks

Des

I have ESXi 5.1.

Thanks

Des

I would also really appreciate this option being turned on in OME.  Please Dell, make it so!