vCSA 5.5 and HP Insight Control Integration

Just some quick notes on integrating HP Insight Control (or SIM) with VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).

You may experience problems trying to monitor the vCSA with SIM/ICE like you used to with a Windows based vCenter.  When trying to discover the vCenter (which is needed in order to register your ESXi hosts with VMM) you will get errors leaving the system as unknown/unmanaged.

Your discovery methods you will try will fail:
1.)  There is no SNMP on the vCenter
2.)  SSH will fail even though your credentials are good

Products:
vCSA 5.5.0b
Insight Control for vCenter 7.3
Insight Control 7.3 CMS installed on Windows Server 2008

I'll describe the fixes I tried to get it working here.  I went down the SNMP route first as most systems with SIM/ICE are discovered with SNMP.  SNMP not being installed was disappointing but can easily be fixed with a few commands.  However this will not allow the system to be discovered in SIM properly.  The commands are as follows, it is important to run them in this exact order.

ssh root@vcenter-server
# Add the repos and accept the keys and such...

zypper addrepo -f http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/ opensuse

zypper addrepo -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/net-snmp:/factory/SLE_11_SP2/  net-snmp

# Install the pre-requisites

zypper install libsensors4

zypper install net-snmp

#edit snmp config file to your settings

vi /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf

#edit the TCP wrappers config file to allow access to SNMP

vi /etc/hosts.allow

#Add the following line

snmpd: ALL : ALLOW

# Set the service to start at boot

chkconfig snmpd on

# Start the service

service snmpd start

After hours of this not working but getting snmp information we went down the route of trying to get SSH working.

THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED BY VMWARE and they may break it later but it works.

VMware places a customer sshd_config file on the vCenter appliance, I'm sure in hopes to make it more secure. However, the accepted ciphers are limited to aes256-ctr and aes128-ctr. Commenting this out and restarting SSH did the trick.

# Edit the sshd_config file and add a # to the Ciphers line

vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Change this from

Ciphers aes256-ctr,aes128-ctr

To

#Ciphers aes256-ctr,aes128-ctr

# Restart SSH

service sshd restart

I did this over an SSH session to the vCSA, so you don't need to do it over the console. After this go back into ICE and rediscover the vCSA with the SSH credentials you will have already had, or add new credentials when doing the discovery scan. Once the vCSA is identified and registered you will be able to register the VME credentials and then the ESXi hosts.