Wednesday, July 27, 2011

SCOM - Installing the HP Proliant Server Management Pack Step by Step

The purpose of this post is to walk you through the installation and configuration of the HP Proliant Server Management Pack into System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (SCOM). There are a few gotcha's that I've come across on customer sites in the past that are mainly attributed to the HP servers either not having the HP Insight Management agents installed, not having the SNMP service installed or just a misconfiguration of the SNMP service.

To begin, download the HP Proliant Server Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 20087 from the link below:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/mom2007/index.html?aoid=35252

When you have downloaded the files, extract them to a folder on your SCOM RMS server and then run the MSI installer to add the HP Proliant Server Management Pack into SCOM. When it completes successfully, you should be able to see the 'Hewlett-Packard Proliant Servers Base', 'Hewlett-Packard Proliant Servers SNMP Management Pack' and the 'Hewlett-Packard Proliant Servers WMI Management Pack' available as shown in the screen below.



The next step that you need to take is to either wait the default 60 minutes for discovery of your HP Proliant Servers, or you can create an override on the discovery to change it to something quicker so you can start working on what SCOM finds in relation to the HP Proliant Server Management Pack. The screenshots below show how to create the override within SCOM to change the discovery time for the 'HP Proliant Server Discovery' rule.



Once the discovery is complete, you should see your HP Proliant servers listed in the 'Server State' view under the 'HP Servers' Management Pack from within the Monitoring tab in SCOM as below.


If all of your HP Proliant Servers are shown in the 'Server State' window above, then that completes the installation of the HP Proliant Servers Management Pack and you will now see alerts coming into SCOM that are read directly from the HP Insight Management agents installed on each HP Proliant Server.

If you do not see all or any of your HP Proliant Servers in the 'Server State' window as above, then the first thing you need to do is to logon locally to the server that is missing and open the 'HP Systems Management Homepage'. The chances are when this page opens, it will have no information on the server in question and come back with a blank screen like the one in the screenshot below.


The reason for the 'HP System Management Homepage' coming back blank is down to a number of factors based around SNMP and the HP Insight Agents. The first to to do is to run the latest HP Proliant Support Pack (PSP) for the model of server you are working on. When you run the HP PSP check for the 'HP Insight Management Agents' and the 'HP Insight Management WBEM Providers for Windows Server 2003/2008 Editions' and it is quite possible that they hadn't been installed or updated the last time the PSP was run on that server.

Just select the radio box next to the Insight Management Agents to install them (see screenshot below)and run the installer from the HP Smart Update Manager to complete the process.

Note: If you need to install the HP Insight Management Agents, your server will need to be rebooted so ensure that you prepare for this before running the installer.


Next up, if you haven't already installed the SNMP service onto your HP Proliant Server, now would be a good time to do it as the 'HP System Management Homepage' depends on the SNMP service to get its information on the hardware. If you are using Windows Server 2008

Once you have the SNMP services installed, open the 'services.msc' snap-in and locate the 'SNMP Service' and double click on it to open up its properties.

When you have the SNMP service properties page open, you need to now enter a community name (such as public for example) into the field below, then click 'Add to List' to add it to the community string list. You also need to enter a trap destination (use the loopback address here) as shown below.


Now click on the 'Security' tab of the SNMP Service properties and configure your settings similar to the window below ensuring you enter the same community name as you created in the last step.

Add your SCOM Management server IP addresses to the 'Accept SNMP packets from these hosts' field and also leave the 'localhost' option in here too. Click 'Apply' now to close the SNMP Service properties.


Once you have finished modifying the SNMP Service Properties, restart the SNMP service. If all is going to plan, then this should also prompt you that it will restart the HP Insight Management Agent services too. If it doesn't prompt you that this is going to happen, then you need to revisit the steps in this post from above on installing the HP Insight Management Agents using the HP Proliant Support Pack (PSP).


When all the SNMP and HP Insight Management Agent Services restart, you should now be able to open the HP Systems Management Homepage to see that all of the system information is now populated like the example in the window below.




Once the HP System Management Homepage is populated with data relevant to the HP Proliant Server you are working on, then the HP Proliant Server Management Pack discovery rules will find your Proliant server and enable monitoring of it from within SCOM.

27 comments:

  1. Great article. Keep up the good work

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  2. i assume this is just for windows servers? as im looking for a scom solution for monitoring esxi 4.1 U1 on DL385s

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  3. Hi Jono,

    Thanks for the comment!

    If you want to monitor HP servers running VMWare, then you either need to download and install the 'HP ProLiant Linux and VMware Management Pack for Microsoft System Center' direct from HP or you can also use the excellent xSNMP community Management Pack which has a sub-management pack for HP Proliant servers.

    See the links below for more information:

    http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c02965254/c02965254.pdf

    http://operatingquadrant.com/2009/08/20/monitoring-hp-hardware-status-on-vmware-esx-servers/

    http://xsnmp.codeplex.com/

    Hope this helps!

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  4. A question please: If I have my SCOM RMS as well as two other MSs, where exactly do I run the setup to install the HP Proliant Management Pack? Do we do that on the RMS only? On the RMS & the MSs? or on the MSs only? Please advise! Thank you very much! Hisham

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  5. Hi Hisham,

    Thanks for the comments!

    You only ever need to install a management pack once into your SCOM environment irregardless of how many Management servers you may have. Sometimes Management Packs come with additional services or components that me also need to be installed onto all of your Management Servers but these are rare and the Management Pack documentation will always specify if this is a requirement.

    As a general rule for myself when doing SCOM installs, I always install Management Packs on the RMS as this is the first point of contact with the SQL databases and it makes sense. Also, some Management Packs such as the Exchange 2010 MP recommend that you install always onto the RMS as it's correlation service needs to be run from an RMS server for best performance.

    As a side note, even though I am recommending that you always install your Management Packs to the RMS, I also recommend to never point any agents at the RMS and instead use your alternate Management Servers to manage the agents.

    Hope this helps!

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  6. Great, Kevin, thanks!
    Thats what I've done: Installed the HP Management Packs to the RMS but I have all my agents (almost) pointing at either one of the MSs.
    Cheers,
    Hisham

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  7. No problem Hisham,

    Sounds like you're on the way to some happy HP monitoring then!

    Glad I can help!

    Kevin.

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  8. Hi,

    Below is my setup.

    I have HP servers SHM set to use SNMP as the data source.

    Using below SNMP settings:
    Community string- XXXXX
    Permitted managers- locahost

    Setting this via GPO.
    This does not disciver all the objects for the servers.

    If i use community string as 'publlic' then only all objects are discovered.

    Can you please help me to know what going wrong at my end.

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  9. Hi Ashutosh,

    Thanks for the comment. Have you tried manually configuring some of the servers using a different community string but not using a GPO?

    Follow the steps I've outlined above and manually configure SNMP on a few servers with a different SNMP community string and see if it works. If it does, then there is something missing from your GPO and you may need to troubleshoot this further.

    Kevin.

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  10. Great post Kelvin.Could you please send me a link to download this MP,EMC and Powerpath.

    Regards

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  11. Hi Kevin,

    Is the VM Management pack for HP Vm is available for free download like how for prolaint.

    For HP Proliant I have just installing directly in the RMS and configured enclosure manager to get in. Since Prolaint MP is one of Pre-req for installing Enclosure MP.

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  12. Hi Kevin,

    We implemented Enclosure MP in SCOM, now I am looking for VM hosted on HP to monitor. Pls help me if the VM Mp is available for download with instructions to implement it SCOM.
    Thanks ton in advance!!!

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  13. Hi Varshinie,

    See the link below for the HP Insight Control for Microsoft System Center 6.3

    It should also have the HP Proliant for Linux and VMware Management Pack contained within the download:

    http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration-msc.html

    Hope this helps!

    Kevin.

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  14. Hi Kevin,
    I installed HP Proliant SNMP Management pack 1.40.3.0 however by default there is an override which is sealed into the management pack to disable alert generation for HW components i.e. temperature sensor etc. It monitors these componenets but alert creation is disabled by an override which cannot be removed (part of sealed management pack). Any ideas how I can go about re-enabling alerts on these monitors?

    Thanks
    Zivan

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    Replies
    1. Hi Zivan,

      You should be able to create a new unsealed MP, then create the override that you need and save it to your new unsealed MP.

      Just right mouse click on the parameter that you are looking to change (it should be in discoveries from the Authoring tab) and then choose Override from the menu to kick off the wizard to make the change.

      Kevin.

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  15. Hi Kevin,

    I have verified my SCOM 2012 following your post, everything looks good, but I don't see the alert from my SCOM 2012 console after I unplugged one of the two power supply from the test HP server. However I can see the alert from the HP Management Home Page. What could you think of the reason

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  16. hello
    i have a ProLiant BL460c G6 and in SCOm 2007 R2 the Memory and the Power supplies are blank
    Have any idea how to enable monitoring for these components
    Thanks Petru

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  17. Hi
    a have a question regarding the monitor in SCOM 2007 R2 of hp server ProLiant DL380 G6 ,the memory and power supply are not shown ,any tips to solve the problem
    It's strange because for some server it's sown and form other is not
    Thanks

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    Replies
    1. Petru,

      You will need to check first that you can see this information from within the HP Management Home Page. If you can't see this information here, then you won't see it in SCOM.

      Also, always ensure that you have the latest HP Proliant Support Pack fully installed - including the HP Insight updates.

      Kevin.

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    2. In the Hp Management Home Page i see the information but In SCOM i don't see it ,am is strange because only the memory i don't see ,
      i will try to update the HP pack and check if this will resolve the problem
      I have this problem to almost 80 servers and diferent model
      Thanks

      Delete
  18. Kevin - Great post. Where should I install the packages, if I have Gateway server in the deployment.

    Thanks

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    Replies
    1. Hi Raja,

      You will always install the packages (management packs) on your management server and not a Gateway server. You can have the agents in the DMZ or untrusted domain that the Gateway server is located in communicating with the Gateway server but this will then pull the monitoring information from the management servers in the trusted domain.

      Kevin.

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  19. Thanks Kevin for your reply. I have one question on the SNMP configuration on Proliant server, where you said, include SCOM server IP to accept SNMP Packets from. In the GW server configuration, I am assuming this should be GW server IP instead of SCOM server. Is my assumption correct.

    Thanks

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  20. Hi Kevin,
    Below is current environment.
    1)SCOM and GW server are in two untrusted domains.
    2)Installed HP Proliant Server MP, VMWare MP etc on SCOM
    3)Target Monitoring servers are in C3000 enclosure with Blades.
    4)Few of the blades have ESXi 4.x and on top of it Windows 2k8 VMWare instances.
    5) Should HP Insight Management Agents be installed on Win 2k8 (Virtual) instances or Just on ESXi 4.x?
    6) I tried installing using HP Smart Update Manager (psp-9.10.w2k8R2.x64.exe); there are so many dependency softwares for HP Insight Management Agent.

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  21. Hi! has anyone tested this MP on SCOM 2012 SP1 ?

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  22. What about SC 2012 R2 OM?

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