How Do You Configure ESXi 3.5 Update 4 to Communicate with DMC

@mjraatz,

Have you gone through the following whitepaper? Was this the documentation that you were mentioning in your thread?

http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/business~solutions~engineering-docs~en/Documents~ESXi%20VMWare%20OM.pdf.aspx

I've spoken to one of the authors of the whitepaper and he should be responding soon to share his expertise.

We have reviewed that whitepaper. We have also reviewed all of the following documents:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smsom/6.0.3/ig/pdf/ig.pdf
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdmc/10/en/ug/ug.pdf
http://en.community.dell.com/groups/dell_management_console/wiki/dmc-faq.aspx (section 13.6)

None of them appear to give a step-by-step guide for setting up Dell Management Console discovery of ESXi 3.5 Update 4 via WSMAN. But, we tried to setup the WSMAN discovery anyhow. And, right now - discovery is not working - so, there must be something we're doing wrong. Anymore information would be greatly appreciated.

I've used the following steps to connect to my ESXi box. This is from memory as I'm not in front of my DMC console right now:
1) Download /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.crt to a directory on the DMC system. I uses pscp.
2) Create new WSMAN credentials in Credential Manager. I used root and the root password. Definitely a security issue but it's the only way I got it to work.
3) Create a new Connection Profile using the WSMAN credentials.
3a) Check the security check box
3b) Enter 443 for the port number
3c) Browse for the certificate downloaded in step 1.
4) Save the connection profile
5) Create a discovery tasking using the connection profile just created with the IP address(es) of your ESXi system(s)

Hope this helps.
3c) browse for the certificate file

Regarding step 2 - are you saying that I need to pull that cert from every ESXi server that I want to manage?
My thinking was that with the CIM client built in this integration should be relatively easy. I'm using ESXi specifically because I don't want anyone logging in to it. My intent is for this solution to be scalable and easily repeatable.
thanks, JM

Please note that the following is not officially supported and comes as is without any expressed further support.

You can use the ESXi shell hack to get a command line. How-to @ http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=196

Here is the process on how to configure esx3i in http mode:

To Configure Http/Https on ESX 3i servers:

1. Use port 80 in the Connection Profile.
2. Edit file: /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml

It should have the following blob of xml for wsman

vim.ProxyService.LocalServiceSpec



httpAndHttps
8889
/wsman

The only element in the XML that needs to be edited is the “accessMode” element.

3. Kill all the hostd processes using the following command:
kill -9 `ps aux | grep hostd | awk '{print $1}'`

This needs to be done on a per ESXi host basis.

Just want to be sure I understand. MEECEJ asked above if (when using HTTPS) - do you have to pull a cert from each individual ESXi server that you want to manage? And, then, you responded by showing how to turn on monitoring over HTTP and HTTPS (by modifying the XML file above). So, are you saying that to monitor over HTTPS (that, in fact, MEECEJ is correct) and you WOULD have to pull a cert from each individual ESXi box and save each one (for each separate ESXi server) as a separate Connection Profile in Dell Mgmt Console? Am I understanding you correctly?

DMC uses WSMAN which requires some form of authentication to access the managed objects. Hence the need to enter credentials.

As for downloading the certificate, this is only necessary if you configure WSMAN to use HTTPS. If you configure WSMAN to use HTTP, you will need to specify the port number in the Connection Profile's Port box. The port number is defined in /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml

The preceding are from my experiences with DMC, YMMV.