As I am preparing for my upgrade to vSphere 6.5, it is time once more to upgrade my HPE management tools, such as HPE Systems Insight Manager and HPE OneView for vCenter. Each has its own challenges and is not without issue.
HPE Systems Insight Manager 7.6
Upgrading to HPE SIM 7.6 from 7.5 was pretty straightforward. The upgrade went well; however, there were several issues with trying to use HPE SIM 7.6. Here is the issue list:
- The Windows version of HPE SIM 7.6 would not start. Debug using mxconfigrepo -c returned
C:\> mxconfigrepo -c ... [HPSIM_DEBUG] CLIF BROKEN - Failure creating server_cert.pem
The solution was to follow the HPE Support Information document mmr_kc-0113201.
- HPE Virtual Machine Manager did not start with HPE SIM. The fix for this was to use the Windows Services tool to start HPE VMM manually, and then to ensure it started all the time by setting it to automatic. To learn more about configuring Windows Services, I suggest a quick search on your browser of choice.
- MIB Import Fails error messages. The solution was simple to find in the HPE HPSIM community forum.
HPE OneView for vCenter
This update was not as simple. You actually have to deploy a new OVA and reconfigure it. You should be able to take a backup, but that did not work for me. There was no solution, so all I could do was reconfigure. However, the reconfigure took very little time to do. For vSphere 6.0, OV4VC works as expected. Well, almost. There is a missing portlet for the server_entity. However, configuration was far from simple. Because the server_entity was missing, discovery was also broken. The fix?
- Use the per node settings to set the node ILO address.
For large environments, this would be painful. For small environments, it is just annoying. It looks like the CIM Provider for vSphere on gen8 and gen9 systems is broken. At least, it was broken for OV4VC 8.1. vCenter sees everything fine.
Update: I upgraded to vSphere 6.5, and OV4VC just does not register as an extension. The main benefit of the product—its integration with vCenter Web Client—is now missing.
Update: After installing OV4VC 8.2.0, vCenter sees everything fine.
Update: Installing OV4VC 8.2.1 required the same approach, except the ILO seemed to be picked up with no issues. This update also fixes the issue where HPE firmware was not displayed.
