Monitoring the IBM BladeCenter chassis with Nagios

Today I ended up working out the details on what we want to monitor regarding our BladeCenter. The most interesting details (for us that is) are these:

  • Fan speeds for Chassis Cooling/Power Module Cooling Bay(s)
  • Temperature
  • Power Domain utilization

It wasn’t *that* hard to implement. Only trouble(s) I ran into, were (1) IBM did a real shitty job with the MIB’s. If you look closely into the mmblade.mib, you’re gonna notice, that not a single OID is specified for the events. (2) As the MIB’s weren’t documented anywhere, I had to look them up via snmpwalk (which I had never used before). So as a reminder (to myself), here’s how it is done:

This will get you a list, with a lot of output (5154 lines to be exact). Lucky me, the web interface of the management module/ssh interface is rather verbose, so all you need to do is compare those values with what you are looking for.

So for myself (and anyone interested) read ahead for the list of checks we are currently running on the management module. Read More

VMware vCenter: is not connected

Well, today I once again had the case where a virtual machine (in my case a Virtual Machine Template) was kinda stuck. You couldn’t remove the template (as in the entries for “Remove from inventory” was grayed out) and you couldn’t re-add the Virtual Machine’s VMX from the datastore browser either.

VI Client - Disconnected templates
VI Client – Disconnected templates

Though, a simple putting the host into maintenance mode and rebooting helped that problem. Maybe there is a simpler solution for this, I just don’t know about it.

Thanks to Sven in #1, I now know that simple solution for my problem!

Half a minute, and a heart-stopping moment later (all VM’s on that host turn grey after the first update) the VM’s are accessible again. Thanks again to Sven!