The customer I'm currently working at has some c7000 enclosures with Insight Control licenses which gives us the ability to monitor the servers with the HP SIM Performance Management Pack. For a windows 2003 hosts the process is quit straightforward: license, configuring logging, monitoring and sample rate and after a while all is fine.

For all our Windows 2008 hosts I encountered the following problem: at the page where the currently selected target systems get analyzed, all Windows 2008 hosts appear as licensed but they are reported as "unsupported configurations". After double checking the PMP supported OS list, I found out Windows 2008 is fully supported. What bothered me was a counter in the upper left corner which stated that there were several unreachable licensed servers.

After googling I found the following ITRC post: Error unsupported configuration which led me to a solution. I generally dislike the idea of altering database content, but I even less liked the idea of having to change the system properties of each Windows 2008 SIM object. So I came up with the following solution: The PMP_V3_0 database contains a table dbo.supported_software which contains all currently supported OS' by PMP. There are several lines which describe all 2008 flavours, though the exact names slightly mismatched what HP SIM was reporting on the System Properties summary. I simply copied the rows and altered them as seen below on the screenshot:



I'm aware that this is the type of solution which might get broken by a PMP upgrade. But it sure made the HP PMP plugin work for all our Windows 2008 hosts.

Although we figured out the necessary steps to add a Windows 2008 failover cluster to HP SIM (currently version 5.2) in our build environment, for some reason this stopped working after some time.

The necessary steps to add a cluster are described below. At first sight some steps may seem unnecessary, but in the end this has proven to be successful. Skipping some of the steps resulted in nodes being discovered with the name of the cluster and vice versa.

Add both nodes

Run an identify task on those nodes in SIM

Restart the SNMP service on both nodes (it will also restart some HP dependent services)

Run an identify task on those nodes in SIM again

Add the virtual IP which is used to administer the cluster

After performing these steps a HP SIM object should be created which represents the cluster. It should look something like this:



On the other hand, if the call seems to time out and you receive something like this:



You might need to apply the following registry fix on all your nodes and redo the discovery process:



All credits go to "Karim H" over at HP ITRC forums: HP SIM: Cluster Monitor (ITRC Forums)