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Oracle® Hardware Management Pack Installation Guide

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Updated: December 2016
 
 

Oracle Server Management Agents

Oracle Server Management Agents provide information about storage and domains to Oracle ILOM and enable in-band monitoring of your Oracle hardware at the OS level over SNMP. You can use this information to integrate your Oracle servers into your data center management infrastructure.

Oracle Server Management Agents include:

  • Oracle Server Hardware Management Agent

  • Oracle Server Hardware SNMP Plugins

  • The itpconfig tool that enables you to configure a trap proxy to send traps between Oracle ILOM and the host server over the Host-to-ILOM Interconnect

The following sections describe these parts. For more information, see Oracle Server Management Agents User’s Guide .

Oracle Server Hardware Management Agent

The Oracle Server Hardware Management Agent (Hardware Management Agent) and associated Oracle Server Hardware SNMP Plugins (Hardware SNMP Plugins) enable you to monitor and manage your server and server module hardware from the OS. In addition, the Hardware Management agent gathers host storage information and provides it to Oracle ILOM.

This in-band functionality enables you to use a single IP address (the host's IP) for monitoring your servers and blade server modules without having to connect the management port of the Oracle Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) SP to the network.

The Hardware Management Agent and Hardware SNMP Plugins run on the host operating system of your Oracle servers, communicating with the Oracle ILOM SP. The Hardware Management Agent daemon, called hwmgmtd, regularly polls the SP for information about the current state of the server. Hardware Management Agent can poll the SP for hardware information over either the Host-to-ILOM Interconnect, available on Oracle's latest servers, or keyboard controller-style (KCS) interface on previous generation servers. This information is then made available by Hardware Management Agent over SNMP using the Hardware SNMP Plugins.


Note -  In previous versions of Hardware Management Pack (before version 2.3.0.0), the agent read the service processor's System Event Log (SEL) records, logged new events to syslog and generated SNMP traps using the host SNMP daemon.

In 2.3.0.0, SEL monitoring was removed from hwmgmtd. No traps or syslogs are generated by hwmgmtd for anything that appears in the SEL. The Hardware Management Agent still generates traps for sensor based issues such as voltage, presence, and temperature.

To log SEL events in the host syslog and generate the corresponding traps, use the ipmievd daemon, which is available as part of ipmitool with Oracle Hardware Management Pack. You can also use the Oracle ILOM Trap Proxy (itpconfig) to forward Oracle ILOM-generated SNMP traps over the Host-to-ILOM interconnect to a configurable destination.


Deploying Hardware Management Agent on Oracle VM for SPARC

When using the Hardware Management Agent on a SPARC server running Oracle VM which has multiple logical domains set up, the Hardware Management Agent can be installed on each logical domain. This enables you to monitor storage devices found in the logical domain using the Hardware Management Agent in a primary domain.

When installing into such a configuration, Hardware Management Agent requires direct access to the hardware that you want to monitor. Oracle VM for SPARC defines an Input / Output (I/O) domain as a domain that has direct ownership and access to the physical devices. Running Hardware Management Agent on a non-I/O domain host does not provide any physical device information because it does not have access to physical I/O devices. As a result, Hardware Management Agent installation is recommended on a I/O Domain or a Control domain. A Control domain is an I/O Domain by default in Oracle VM for SPARC.

Oracle Server Hardware SNMP Plugins

The Oracle Server Hardware SNMP Plugins consists of OS-native SNMP plugins and hardware-specific Management Information Base (MIB) files which have been designed to enable you to monitor your Oracle servers effectively using SNMP.

The sunHwMonMIB describes the state of sensors and alarms on your servers and provides the following information:

  • Overall system alarm status

  • Aggregate alarm status by device type

  • FRU Alarm status

  • Lists of sensors, sensor types, sensor readings, and sensor thresholds

  • Indicator states

  • System locator control

  • Inventory including basic manufacturing information

  • Product and chassis inventory information (such as serial number and part numbers)

  • Per-sensor alarm status

The sunHwTrapMIB describes a set of traps for hardware events that can be generated by an Oracle server and provides the following information:

  • Conditions affecting the environmental state of the server (such as temperature, voltage, and current out-of-range conditions)

  • Error conditions affecting the hardware components in the server, such as FRU insertion and removal and security intrusion notification

The sunStorageMIB provides the following information about system storage:

  • Basic manufacturing information, properties, and alarm status for controllers

  • Properties and alarm status for disks

  • Properties and alarm status for RAID volumes

  • Status of logical components

itpconfig and the ILOM Trap Proxy

The itpconfig command-line interface (CLI) tool configures Oracle ILOM to forward SNMP traps to the host over the Host-to-ILOM Interconnect, available on servers with the necessary hardware. See your server documentation to check if your server supports Host-to-ILOM Interconnect. You can also use itpconfig to configure the Host-to-ILOM Interconnect between Oracle ILOM SP and the host.