I'm looking to monitor ESX Servers, I know this question was asked about a year ago, I was hoping that today there is a way to monitor it directly in SCOM.Paul Arbogast

I use nworks Management Pack for VMware.

nWorks (Veeam) or Bridgeways have MPs you can purchase. Unfortuantely thats the only way unless you try to write something custom yourself.

how does that work exactly, how would you install an agent on those machines or does it come with the agent you need to use?Paul Arbogast

nWorks use the information from the VCenter server http://www.veeam.com/vmware-microsoft-esx-monitoring.html

Bridgeways does the same as Veeam. If you want to monitor hardware, and you use HP ProLiants, you can install the HP agents on the ESX machine, and use either of the following MPs to translate the snmp traps to actionable SCOM alerts. http://xsnmp.codeplex.com/ http://rburri.wordpress.com/2008/06/03/snmp-only-hp-proliant-hardware-management-pack/Layne, 2011 Microsoft Community Contributor Recipient

http://www.bictt.com/blogs/bictt.php/2011/05/24/scom-trick-6-vmware-monitoring for a list of possibilities. Actually the Nworks you would first connect it to the vcenter where possible. But it is also possible to connect to individual machines. It also has additional options for Dell and HP hardware on top of that. Check out the guide. The other options will also give differen levels of monitoring. I have seen people who only want to ping the box and I have seen people who want every bit of information imagineable from esx and hardware and storage. From the paid alternatives my favorite is still Nworks.Bob Cornelissen - BICTT (My BICTT Blog)

Both nWorks MP for VMware and Bridgeways MP for VMware are pretty solid products and will on a basic level cost you pretty much the same. nWorks has a lot of nice features, though some of them will increase the price further. It is somewhat eventlog heavy in it's monitoring which I am not quite fond of, but the HA-features might balance that flaw anyway. Bridgeways MP for VMware is a bit more focused I'd say and I like their approach a bit more and it tends be a fire-and-forget kind of deployment. Both products have a lot of reports and are pretty scalable (yea, Bridgeways have HA and Scalability too, read the manual). Both products are able to talk to both vCenter and directly to the ESX(i) hosts. They then use slightly different approach in their mid-tier, or data bridge if you like, and that's where they differ the most. I'd say get trials of them both, evaluate them and decide for your self. On a side not, if Bridgeways and nWorks are a bit much, pricewise, there is also Jalasoft Xian IO. Xian IO has a "smart pack" (or whatever they call them) that are licensed on a per-vCenter basis as opposed to the others per-socket approach. It is not as intelligent as the other two, but it might just be "good enough". To add to the confusion, VMWare also has it's own VMware Operations that comes with a SCOM connector. And so does Vizioncores Foglight. Plenty of options to pick from. Stay away from the Quest VMware MP thogh, the architecture is horrid.

Thanks Astromek, good advice on all that. and yeah I have some experience with Quest, I'm not to fond of their software. Paul Arbogast