I recently talked to a few customers and OEM partners who are somewhat fairly new to Emulex OneCommand Manager for Windows. As of this writing, we are using Emulex OneCommand Manager for Windows version 6.3. An issue that keeps popping up is about adding a vSphere ESXi 5.1 hosts in order to manage our Emulex adapters. The process seems fairly straightforward, but at times with all of the management tools out there it can be confusing.
The issue I hear is, “how do I add a vSphere ESXi host to OneCommand Manager because it will not appear in the table of contents for hosts discovered or I get a host unreachable error?” These problems can be overcome if you use the correct login information on the ESXi host and/or use the correct namespace. We hope this blogs helps answers these questions.
When you start Emulex’s OneCommand Manager for Windows, it will show the hosts that were previously added as it is shown in Figure 1. To add the new host you select Discovery -> TCP/IP-> Add Host …
Figure 1 shows four hosts in the managed host section in the Emulex OneCommand Manager application.
If you leave the default values for both options “Add using default credentials” or “Add using specific CIM credentials” you will see a similar error message as the figure below stating the host is unreachable.
Figure 2. Host unreachable due to default and incorrect login information
In order to successfully add a VMware vSphere host to Emulex OneCommand Manager for Windows you need to know a few things:
- Protocol (http or https)
- Port (Default: 5988 or 5989)
- Host name or IP address of the host
- The root login name and password
The protocol to use will either be http or https for ESX hosts. For ESXi hosts the protocol will be https, since by default sfcb is disabled. The default port numbers used for http and https are 5988 and 5989. We will use https with port 5989 as the default. The root and password are the ones you entered during the initial install of VMware vSphere. Do not use the standard default root and password that shows up automatically when you try to discover the hosts.
As for namespaces, there are two namespaces you need to be aware of and it depends on the provider you use. You are either going to use the inbox or out-of-box provider. For example, If the latest Emulex CIM provider and VMware adapter driver are installed on the host you need to make sure to add the correct namespace for out-of-box provider. See Figure 3 which demonstrates the namespace for the out-of-box provider to use.
Figure 3. The red outline shows the fields which are important for adding the host to the table of contents besides the IP address or host name.
When you use the in-box driver with ESX/ESXi 4.x you would want to make sure the namespace field has the correct information. The table below from Emulex OneCommand Manager manual shows the namespace and recommended provider to use.
Table 1. Namespaces Used for Providers
If you need to know what provider is being used? Login to the vSphere host and check the name of the provider being used. If the provider begins with deb_ it’s the inbox provider. If its cross_ , then it will be the out-of-box provider.
The example below shows the how find the provider being used.
~ # esxupdate --vib-view query | grep emulex-cim-provider deb_emulex-cim-provider_410.2.0.32.1-207424 installed 2010-04-01T07:00:00+00:00 cross_emulex-cim provider_410.3.1.16.1235786 installed 2010-10-11T09:39:04.047082+00:00
Last, when the correct user name, password and namespace are used you will get a successful message window from OneCommand Manager stating the host has been added successfully as shown in Figure 5.
Figure 4 shows the new vSphere ESXi 5.1 host on the discovered host table of contents
Hopefully this clarifies the issue or challenge of adding a VMware vSphere ESXi host with Emulex OneCommand Manager for Windows. If you any questions please feel free to reach out to us at implementerslab@emulex.com