Setting up Managed Systems in ICE-Linux without the ProLiant Service Pack

HP SIM Managed Servers

HP Systems Insight Management (HP SIM) is a centralized management system with many ways of

finding a managed system and collecting data about it. The requirements for a management system

range from responding to an ICMP ping command to supporting specialized data collection agents.

HP SIM uses these sources of information to classify and to further assess the management capabilities

of a system.

In the case of a server node, a server can be classified as managed or unmanaged and within the

managed category as fully manageable or partially manageable. The definition of manageability

changes for different classes of server, server hardware, the operating system running on that server,

and whether it has any enhanced management agents.

The scope of this document covers the manageability of HP servers with GNU/Linux® operating

systems without using the ProLiant Service Pack (PSP) agents.

Discovery and Management

Supported and unsupported GNU/Linux operating systems including Red Hat® Enterprise Linux,

Novell® SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server, and Debian® are managed on the ProLiant server platform

using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). SNMP is a data collection system with agents

on the managed nodes that respond to queries from a central management server (CMS). For the

purpose of this document, HP SIM plays the role of CMS.

When HP SIM discovers a node, it also identifies and probes it for additional information from the

SNMP agent. If the queries are satisfactory, HP SIM elevates the node from a discovered unmanaged

node to a managed node and performs an association test to determine if any known management

processor nodes are associated with this node. The identification procedure is then followed by a

hardware discovery and data collection procedure to fully populate a CMS data table about the

node.

HP SIM Discovery

HP SIM uses its discovery mechanism to determine the existence of a server and whether or not it is

manageable. HP SIM has both manual and automated methods for discovering systems to manage.

There is also an advanced option that discovers a system when HP SIM receives unsolicited SNMP

events or traps. This document focuses on the use of SNMP traps for discovery and configuration of

managed systems.

ColdStart Trap Discovery

When HP SIM receives a trap (or event), the trap includes the event type, the notification message,

and the IP address where the event originated. HP SIM handles the event according to its event-

handling database.

Typically, when an SNMP agent starts up, it immediately sends an event of type ColdStart to any

CMS it is configured to notify by the trapsink directive. By default, few (if any) events are handled

and are merely logged by the CMS.