Does the VMAN standalone free poller work with SAM Hardware Health and SAM Asset Inventory?

Does the VMAN standalone Free Poller work with SAM Hardware Health and SAM Asset Inventory?

The simple answer is no, you should you deploy a standard Orion polling engine that has both VMAN and SAM installed to make this work.

The following are examples of possible issues:

• The Orion Platform has stopped collecting asset inventory details for all VMWare ESX hosts for many months.
• For the new ESX added the asset inventory tab is missing from node details.

• Polling Tables show all VMware assets as stopped polling months ago:

  NodeID	PollingDescriptionName	LastPollDateTimeUtc	Enabled
  661	ServerSNMP	2018-10-30T11:03:18.4300000	1
  660	WindowsServerWMI	2018-10-30T10:54:27.9600000	1
  599	ServerSNMPDell	2018-10-28T11:52:05.2130000	1
  255	VMwareAPI	2018-02-13T16:01:50.3870000	1
  254	VMwareAPI	2018-02-13T16:01:17.0130000	1

• The reason the Asset Inventory stopped working:

  • The VMAN free poller was installed to load balance VMAN.

  • All VMware nodes were re-assigned from other pollers to the VMAN free poller.

  • The VMAN free poller does not have SAM installed, nor can you install another product on these types of polling engines.

  • As a result, all SAM polling for VMware's Asset Inventory and Hardware Health for nodes assigned to the VMAN free poller will not occur.

• The VMAN free poller isn’t needed as the load is low:

  • VMAN and SRM can use the normal Orion additional polling engines (APEs).
  • If a user has APEs already it makes sense to keep using these.
  • The free pollers are mainly used for standalone installations. Older versions of VMAN (with the appliance) and SRM (profiler) had free collectors, so the free pollers are a replacement for these now that both modules are fully built on the Orion Platform.
  • The free pollers are a nice option to have. But if you already have you other Orion additional polling engines, you can just use them to get better statistics using cross product polling.
  • If you want to check how much polling for VIM each poller is doing, you can do this using:
    • Orion Website -> Settings -> Polling Engines 
    • Or using SQL: Select * From Engines
    • This will show your capacity for NPM, SAM, and VIM.
    • It will show a value between 0-100% if all is working well, or over 100% if you're over polling.

    • Example: You're only at 13% capacity on Engine x, so all is working well.

      EngineID	PropertyName	PropertyType	PropertyValue
      1	VIM.VMware.Polling	Scale Factor	0
      13	VIM.VMware.Polling	Scale Factor	3