3

I have a server running VMware ESXi 4.1.0 and while I love the graphs within the vSphere Client, they provide no historical data with the license I have. Also, all my other servers are monitored via a Cacti virtual machine running on this host.

Is there any way to monitor and create graphs for a VMware ESXi host using Cacti? How could I do this? Are there Cacti templates available?

Josh
  • 9,190
  • 28
  • 80
  • 128

4 Answers4

4

There is a pretty in depth answer that someone else has used for this problem below:

http://www.thelazysysadmin.net/2009/04/monitoring-vmwares-free-esxi-35-with-cacti/

rfelsburg
  • 767
  • 3
  • 7
  • +1 - it's for 3.5 but if you don't find an ESXi 4.x template the OIDs are probably similar or identical & this could be used as-is or with minor changes. – voretaq7 Apr 12 '11 at 14:58
  • Thanks! I ended up combining this with @voretaq7's answer for a perfect solution. – Josh Apr 12 '11 at 21:58
2

I'm not sure if there are existing templates, but you can certainly do this by enabling SNMP and using the SNMP - Generic OID Template to graph VMWare's various performance metrics.

I also wouldn't be surprised if a search on the Cacti Scripts & Templates forum turned up a template for ESXi 4.x

voretaq7
  • 79,879
  • 17
  • 130
  • 214
  • I wish I could have accepted both your answer and @rfelsburg's, because I ended up using both of them. I tried your first since I preferred purse SNMP, but it didn't give me CPU/memory usage. His answer, however, didn't give network usage! Together I have the perfect solution. – Josh Apr 12 '11 at 21:58
0

From cacti forum:

VMware (vSphere 5 or higher) has dropped support of SNMP. You have to use CIM/SMASH in order to obtain hardware status, etc. You have to use their API in order to obtain "higher level" performance stats like CPU utilization, Memory utilization, Disk IO, etc. AFAIK Cacti doesn't have a means for doing either of those.

Alex
  • 231
  • 2
  • 4
0

Regarding (vSphere 5 or higher) dropping support of SNMP, this is not so. MIB modules for all VMware products are available from one download: http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/managementapi And vSphere 5.1 has full snmpv1/v2c/v3 agent, some description of it found here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/04/vsphere-5-1-feature-enhancements-networking-mib-support-part-1.html#comment-161220

MRSNMP
  • 11