If you are deploying HP servers with Citrix XenServer 7.x or with XCP-ng 7.x, follow along to make sure you have the current HP SNMP Agents installed on your XenServer. This add-on allows you to perform SNMP management, and server health monitoring. In addition you get some useful tools for gathering system information and array data.
Getting the tools
Start by getting the current version of HP’s Agent tools, This can be a confusing and often soul sucking experience as HP’s website does not make it easy to find the correct version.
At the time of this writing you can browse the releases here. Hopefully in 8 months when we look back the link will still work. If not you want to search for Drivers and Software downloads on support.hpe.com and search for “HPE SNMP Agents for Citrix XenServer“. At the time of this posting the current version is 10.50, but make sure you double check. For those interested that link is available directly from HP: https://downloads.hpe.com/pub/softlib2/software1/pubsw-linux/p829541494/v128478/hp-agents-10.50-2.XS7.iso
Installing HP SNMP Agents
Now before you jump to downloading this do your computer, first SSH into your XenServer or XCP-ng server, and you can paste the following commands to automate your task a little.
cd /tmp
wget https://downloads.hpe.com/pub/softlib2/software1/pubsw-linux/p829541494/v128478/hp-agents-10.50-2.XS7.iso
mount -ro loop /tmp/hp-agents-10.50-2.XS7.iso /mnt
cd /mnt
./install.sh
You will be prompted to allow the setup script to install additional tools, and the rest is automated.
You may get some errors, about not compatible software these appear to be warnings related to the Signature key. Install should install fine. Now that the HP SNMP Agents on XenServer are installed you can setup your external monitoring. We recommend using Zabbix as a powerful monitoring platform, but any SNMP management tool will work.
Be sure to reboot the server. You can now setup SNMP management of your XenServer. And don’t forget to check out our other posts on XenServer. Like automating startup and shutdown, or adding local SR Repositories.
Ben has been building VoIP solutions for over 15 years, has over 25 years of Linux administration experience, and enjoys problem-solving. When he is not coding something in Python, or tinkering with some project, you can often find him wandering through the forests and parks of the Pacific Northwest enjoying waterfalls, trails, and animals.