HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure Release Notes

for HP Operations Manager for Windows®, HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris operating systems

Software version: 1.60

Publication date: October 2010

This document is an overview of the features in HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure (Virtualization Infrastructure SPI). It contains important information that is not included in the manual or the online help. This release notes is applicable for both 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems. Information specific to 64-bit systems is highlighted in bold-italics.

You can find information about the following in this document:

What's New in This Release?
Supported Environments
Installation Notes
Enhancements and Fixes
Known Problems, Limitations, and Workarounds
Documentation Updates
Support
Legal Notices

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What's New in This Release?

HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure contains new features, feature enhancements, and other changes.

New Features

The Virtualization Infrastructure SPI version 1.60 contains these new features:

• New platforms supported on management server
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs extends the support onHPOM for Windows 9.0 on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers, HPOM for Solaris, and HP Operations Manager i (HP OMi) in addition to the existing support on HPOM for Windows, HP-UX, and Linux.
  To monitor using Infrastructure SPI 1.60 for 64-bit servers, on HPOM for Windows 9.0 on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers:
  1. Install Infrastructure SPI for 64-bit servers
  2. Install the Infrastructure SPI hotfix for HPOM-Windows 9.00. Contact HP Support to obtain the hotfix.
• Localization Support
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs supports Japanese and Simplified Chinese locales on HPOM for Windows.
• HP OMi Content Pack for Infrastructure
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs includes HP OMi content pack for Infrastructure. For more information, see HP Operations Manager i Content Pack for Infrastructure Release Notes.

Enhancements and Changes

The Virtualization Infrastructure SPI version 1.60 contains these enhancements and changes:

• Enhancements for Policy Grouping
  • New policy grouping based on operating systems and vendors is introduced in addition to the monitored aspect based grouping.
  • After installation of Infrastructure SPIs 1.60, the policies appear under the current version number on the HPOM console. The policies for version 1.60 will appear under v1.60 in the console. On a system where the SPIs are upgraded, the existing policies for version 1.00 will be grouped under v1.00 in the console. For more information, see HP Operations Infrastructure Smart Plug-ins Installation Guide.
  • The policy group name SPI for infrastructure on HPOM console is changed to Infrastructure Management.
• Changes in Tracing
  
  • The discovery policy is enhanced to send out appropriate messages to the HPOM console when discovery fails. These messages specify the problem and resolution on how to fix the issue.
  • This version of Infrastructure SPIs consolidates the trace options. The trace flag can be set to any of three options: no trace messages, send trace messages to console, and log trace messages in a file.
• Changes in Node Group Layout
  The node group layout has been enhanced to provide more meaningful node group names and the groups have been re-organized for easy navigation on HPOM for HP-UX, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.
• Changes in Message Groups
  This version of Infrastructure SPIs adds new message groups OS and HA for Infrastructure SPIs version 1.60 messages, while retaining the earlier message groups System and Clusters.

For information about customer-related enhancements and software fixes, see Enhancements and Fixes.

Supported Environments

Before installing the Virtualization Infrastructure SPI, make sure that your system meets the following minimum requirements for HPOM management server and managed nodes.

To know about the supported operating system architectures, supported operating system release versions, and for recent updates, go to the support matrix URL:HP Software Support Matrix.

Management server requirements:

The Infrastructure SPIs are supported on the following versions of HPOM, HP Performance Manager, and HP Reporter on the management server.

Managed node requirements:

The Infrastructure SPIs are supported on Windows, AIX, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris managed nodes.

*It is recommended that you install the latest available Agent patches on the management server. To know more about the required patches, visit the HP Support web site at: HP Software Support Online.

Supported virtualization environments on the managed nodes:

Installation Notes

Installation requirements, as well as instructions for installing the Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure are documented in the HP Operations Smart Plug-ins for Infrastructure Installation Guide provided in PDF (.pdf) format.

Enhancements and Fixes

The following items (identified by reference number) are fixed in the current software release. You can view details about each software enhancement or fix using the reference number from the HP Software Support Online. You need a HP passport to access this web site. To set up your passport profile, go to: HP Support.

• QCCR1A100206: VI SPI (Infrastructure SPIs) Discovery fails due to the GBL_SYSTEM_ID metric getting truncated to 40 characters.

  Fix: The host information is correctly obtained and discovery works without any issue.

• QCCR1A101754: VI-VMwareVMFSUtilizationMonitor showing different alerts for the same device.

  Fix: The policy has been modified to take care of data store refreshes.

Known Problems, Limitations, and Workarounds

The known problems and workarounds for this release of Virtualization Infrastructure SPI are listed below:

• QCCR1A114413 (for 64-bit only)

  Problem: VI SPI license file fails to install on HPOM for Windows 9.00 during VI SPI installation. Therefore, the VI SPI license report does not show the correct status.

  Workaround: Install the Infrastructure SPI hotfix for HPOM-Windows 9.00. Contact HP Support to obtain the hotfix.

• QCCR1A114415 (for 64-bit only)

  Problem: Instant-On license tag is disabled in VISPI license xml. Therefore, the VI SPI license report does not show the correct status.

  Workaround: Install the Infrastructure SPI hotfix for HPOM-Windows 9.00. Contact HP Support to obtain the hotfix.

• QCCR1A105913 (for 64-bit only)

  Problem: On HPOM for Windows 9.0 installed on Windows 2008 (64-bit) servers, InfraSPI 1.6 installation takes more than 60 minutes.

  Workaround: Set the proxy for the SYSTEM user on the HPOM server because InfraSPI runs the HPOM for Windows scripts as SYSTEM. The syntax to set the proxy is:

  Windows 2008:
  netsh winhttp set proxy [proxy-server=] <ProxyServerName> [bypass-list=] <HostsList>

  Windows 2003:
  proxycfg -d -p <ProxyServerName> "<Hostlist>"

• QCCR1A110089 (for 64-bit only)

  Problem: InfraSPI policies do not get deployed automatically on Windows 2008 R2 nodes.

  Workaround: Manually deploy the policies to the Windows 2008 R2 node group listed under Nodes > HP Defined Groups in the HPOM management console.

• QCCR1A102540

  Problem: NIC Ids mismatch in the discovered NIC services and alert messages. This causes incorrect update in the service map state when alerts related to a particular NIC are received.

• QCCR1A105116

  Problem: Unable to upload Chinese policies to Simplified Chinese HPOM for Windows 8.16 server.

• QCCR1A104990

  Problem: Unable to deploy Japanese policy to a Japanese locale node from Chinese HPOM for Windows 8.16 server.

• QCCR1A91176

  Problem: Monitoring for special Windows server 2008 Eventlogs needed.

• QCCR1A95885

  Problem: Virtualization Infrastructure SPI on Win2008 x64/ IA64 has the following known limitations:

  • Alert message attributes, message group, and message text of a few policies have unresolved variable name <$SESSION(MessageGroup)>  on Win2k8 IA64 node.
  • Infrastructure SPIs Measurement Threshold policies that use perl modules like OvTrace.pm, OvPrum.pm, etc do not work on x64 systems.

• QCCR1A105999

  Problem: Monitor Agent (opcmona) gets aborted when Infrastructure SPIs policies are deployed on the node.

• QCCR1A95020

  Problem:. Service Discovery server does not hanlde DeleteRelationship elements (One resource group (RG) shows dependancy line on both the nodes even though the RG is running on one node.)

• QCCR1A96995

  Advanced Monitoring policies modified in HPOM for UNIX Admin GUI fail to run after deployment to managed nodes. When advanced monitoring policies are edited in GUI mode in HPOM for UNIX policy editor, syntax errors are induced into the Perl code module. This causes the policy to fail to execute. Errors such as the following appear:

  "An error occurred in the processing of the policy 'SI-LinuxSshdProcessMonitor'. Please check the following errors and take corrective actions. (OpC30-797)
  Error during evaluation of threshold level "Processes - Fill Instance list" (OpC30-728)
  Execution of instance filter script failed. (OpC30-714)
  Perl Script execution failed: syntax error at PerlScript line 11, near "1
  
  #BEGIN_PROCESSES_LIST
  #ProcName=/usr/sbin/sshd
  #Params=
  #Params=
  #MonMode=>=
  #ProcNum=1
  #END_PROCESSES_LIST
  @ProcNames"
  Missing right curly or square bracket at PerlScript line 17, within string
  syntax error at PerlScript line 17, at EOF
  . (OpC30-750)"

  The un-edited advanced monitoring policies (Measurement Threshold type) work fine when deployed from HPOM for UNIX.

  Workaround: To edit the settings in the Measurement Threshold policy, use ‘Edit in Raw mode’ feature of the HPOM for UNIX Admin GUI to change the policy contents. This requires you to know the syntax of the policy data file.

• QCCR1A95505

  HPOM Monitor Agent’s memory usage increases to the point where the system runs out of memory and the monitor agent aborts. The opcmona has memory leak while processing policies with embedded perl script. The issue is more prone to occur when you deploy many (30 or more) advanced monitoring policies using embedded Perl scripts.

• Enabling alerts for Log monitoring policies for RHEL and SLES on managed nodes running agent as non-root user

  Systems Infrastructure SPI supports policies and tools for alternative, non-root user on HTTPS agents. The following policies fail to work on RHEL and SLES systems:

  • SI-LinuxBootLog
  • SI-LinuxSecureLog
  • SI-LinuxKernelLog

  To enable alerts for log monitoring for Infrastructure SPIs on non root agents follow these steps::

  1. Change the Permission of the required log files with the following command:

  For RHEL:
  chmod 444 /var/log/messages
  chmod 444 /var/log/boot.log
  chmod 444 /var/log/secure

  For SLES:
  chmod 444 /var/log/messages
  chmod 444 /var/log/boot.log

  Doing this will enable users to read the logs and help to generate alerts.

  2. Change the permission of OVBBCCB and OPCLE process with the following command:

     chmod 4555 /opt/OV/bin/ovbbccb
     chmod 4555 /opt/OV/lbin/eaagt/opcle

  3. Switch to Non-root user by running the following command:
     

     su - <non-root user name>

  4. Restart ovc by running the following commands:

     ovc -stop
     ovc -start

  5. To check the status of all process, run the command OVC. It displays all process up and running, without any process shown as aborted.

Limitation (for 64-bit only)

HP Reporter is not supported on HPOM for Windows 9.00 (64-bit), therefore, do not install the Infrastructure SPI reports package on HPOM for Windows 9.00 (64-bit). You must install the reporter package only on 32-bit systems where HP Reporter is installed.

Documentation Updates

The following documentation is available for Virtualization Infrastructure SPI:

• HP Operations Infrastructure Smart Plug-ins Installation Guide
• HP Operations Infrastructure Smart Plug-ins Concepts Guide
• HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure Online help
• HP Operations Smart Plug-in for Virtualization Infrastructure User Guide

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