HP Systems Insight Manager or the like?

Can anyone give me a real low down on what this thing is capable of? Sorry the HP site really just tries a salesman like pitch rather than telling what I can use it for.
It seems some sort of it is a hardware monitor. Which is what Im primarily interested in. Unfortuntely the HP site says it only supports: ML110 G7, DL120 G7
Quite limited I would say. Im thinking a name change; is there another named bit of software that can do the same? Maybe an older versions that supports older hardware?

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Essendon

Yeah SIM is a hardware monitor, tells you when a power supply is down or when a disk is failing/failed. We use it to monitor G4 through to G6's, no issues. Can be a bit of a b!tch to set up, once up it's good. There's a lot to it, you can monitor printers, racks, enclosures and I think it can monitor clusters too.

nimrod.sixty9

Essendon wrote: »

Yeah SIM is a hardware monitor, tells you when a power supply is down or when a disk is failing/failed. We use it to monitor G4 through to G6's, no issues. Can be a bit of a b!tch to set up, once up it's good. There's a lot to it, you can monitor printers, racks, enclosures and I think it can monitor clusters too.

Exactly what I need it for! I believe we have HP and Compaq DL360 G4's, not totally sure right now as I have a lot going on and need to get my **** together ASAP. So assuming thats what Im running, would SIM work? Would I need any additional hardware; or?

Essendon

Yeah SIM should work, provided you install it properly of course. The installation is mostly a next, next, finish thing, but you need to have SQL/Oracle for the DB side of things. You should check out the installation instructions for it here.

On the funny side, SIM can (and is in our case) send out emails to HP if something fails. Now some of these are false alerts like someone yanked the power cord or something similar. The phone goes off the hook, HP mission critical support ringing us, emails coming back and forth, sometimes it feels like we lost a satellite or something.

nimrod.sixty9

Essendon wrote: »

Yeah SIM should work, provided you install it properly of course. The installation is mostly a next, next, finish thing, but you need to have SQL/Oracle for the DB side of things. You should check out the installation instructions for it here.

On the funny side, SIM can (and is in our case) send out emails to HP if something fails. Now some of these are false alerts like someone yanked the power cord or something similar. The phone goes off the hook, HP mission critical support ringing us, emails coming back and forth, sometimes it feels like we lost a satellite or something.

Hmm now I have to ask does this app have to have a SLA with HP or something? Id like those emails to go to me :P

Would you see a problem putting that DB on a VMware VM? I dont see why not as its really not mission critical. Correct?
EDIT: Looks like it fully supports ESXi 4 and 4.1 woo!

My I ask what you have done when you set this up? Sorry you replied and Im a noob, so your going to get some stupid questions.

Excellent link thank you!

Essendon

Nah you are right mate, no question is stupid. I dont see a problem with putting the DB on a VM. Just ensure you follow those instructions. TBH, I didnt set the thing up, it was already there when I started at my current role, but have tinkered with it a fair bit. I was told it can be a bit of a furry kitten to set it up, no major issues though.

And you can (and rightly should) have email alerts sent to you too, we just have HP cc'd in (contract requirements). The only SLA we have with HP is they reply (or call us) within 5 minutes of receiving an alert about something having gone down.

Everyone

Make sure you use the latest version and keep it up to date. The web interface for it has had a lot of vulnerabilities over the years. You don't need the web interface for it to work though, so if you don't use it, you can uninstall just that portion and still use the rest of the tools, or disable the service for it and turn it on only when you need it.

Lizano

If your are using the Remote Support Pack of SIM, do not install on a vm server.

From experience.