Monitoring VMware with SCOM

Are you using SCOM for monitoring your Windows servers? Are you heavily virtualizing your servers with VMware? If yes, it will be nice to have one big picture of your whole Windows infrastructure together with virtualization platform.


In my last SCOM projects, customers where seeking some free solution how to get health status of their VMWare infrastructure into SCOM. Fortunately on Internet you can find free community VMWare management pack for SCOM: https://github.com/Mitch-Luedy/Community.VMware


It is very simply solution, but for visualizing health state of your VMware world is sufficient.


Lets look how to implement it:


1) Install SCOM agent on your VMware vCenter server. If you have more vCenter servers in your environment, no problem, install it on all.


2) Install VMWare vSphere PowerCLI on SCOM management server. You can download it directly from VMWare web site. Do not install latest version because it is not using PowerShell modules any more and they are required by MP workflows.
In my last project I used successfully version VMware-PowerCLI-6.3.0-3737840. You can install it on one SCOM management server or on more. You are controlling which management server will be used by Community - VMware Monitoring Resource Pool after importing MPs.


3) Now you need to grant rights to VMware infrastructure. You can use SCOM Default Action Account and delegate read only access in VMware or you can use dedicated domain service account. This service account you need to specify in Community - VMware Monitoring Profile after importing MPs.


From network perspective, you need open TCP port 443 from your SCOM management servers to VMware vCenter server/s. Of course, SCOM agent needs TCP port 5723 from vCenter servers to SCOM management server.


4) Import MPs Community.VMware.mpb and Community.VMware.Unsealed.xml

And that's it. Wait until your VMware vCenter servers will be discovered. Then PowerShell workflows will run automatically on them and populate SCOM object classes for VMware Datacenters, Clusters, Hosts, Networks, Data stores and Virtual Machines.

I will show you in upcoming posts how you can use those classes for visualizing health data in nice Visio based dashboards.

Thanks Community for this wonderful MP!