I have two hosts running the free ESXi hypervisor. However, we use Nagios for monitoring, and I've received conflicting information about how we should monitor these systems. Are my findings below accurate?
- ESXi with free license does not support SNMP monitoring via Nagios. True?
- vSphere supports SNMP monitoring via Nagios. True?
- Upgrade to vSphere simply requires a license change in the host. Really?
I was under the impression that ESXi does not include the RHEL environment that would allow us to install the Nagios plugins, so it seems weird that a simple license change would suddenly give us root access, and allow us to monitor it. My co-worker said he was recently forced to rebuild a vSphere host from scratch instead of upgrading ESXi, so I'd like to know if that is a requirement or not.
Also, if you monitor your VMware hosts with Nagios, please let me know if you have a better way of doing it.