Setting up ProSphere to discover Cisco Switches

 

If you’ve been following my install guide series for ProSphere 1.7 you know that we have already installed the ProSphere vApp, we setup the discovery of the the VNX and in my last blog, we setup the discovery of the VMware Infrastructure.  The next step is to add in the fabric switch information.  In this case, we will be adding in 2(ea) Cisco Nexus switches.  Once we get this squared away, we will have a true end-to-end overview of our ProSphere discoverable environment.

So let’s get this fun started.

First things first, we need to make some changes to our switches.  For this you will need to SSH into the switches.

1. SSH into the Switch, and let’s make sure all the SNMP traps are enabled.  Run “show snmp trap” and you should see output that looks similar to below.   Notice some of the “No’s” on the enable side of the results.  We need to turn those into “yes’s” !

2. To change these from “no” to “yes” run the following commands.  “Config terminal” and then type “snmp-server enable traps” hit enter and then to get out of that, hit control-z.  Then run “show snmp trap” again and you should see the changes.

3. Now we need to setup an SNMP community with READ Only capabilities.  First things first, run “show snmp community” to see if you already have something setup.  In my case, I had nothing. 

4. Now we need to run the “config terminal” command and then type “snmp-server community eccuser ro”.  This is going to create an eccuser account with read only access.

5.Now just run “show snmp community” again and you should see the eccuser info.  Now do this for each Cisco switch you want to discover.

 

Moving on, we need to now go into ProSphere and set it up to discover these new switches. 

 

6.Log into ProSphere, click on Discovery, then access credentials and then “create access credentials”  If you followed my last couple of blogs, you can probably guess what the next few steps will be

7. For these Cisco switches, I’m using SNMP v1/v2 but you will also see a version for SNMP v3 – I’m following the v1/v2 process so choose that option, name the Access Credentials and then enter in the community user name – in this case it’s eccuser.  Now click okay.

8.Now let’s create a Discovery Job, click on it towards the top and then click ‘”Create Job”.

9. Now click the check box for Switches and then add the IP address of each switch in below.  Just click the PLUS sign to add another switch. 

10. In this window, you just want to add the cisco credentials we created in step 7 to the selected access credentials list and then click finish.

11. You should now be back at the Discovery Jobs section, and you should see your Cisco Discovery job has been created, but has never run.  Click on that job, and then click RUN.

12. If you set everything up correctly, you can hit the refresh button on that section and see that it changes from Never Run to 100% Complete.

13. Let’s go see what it discovered.  Click on Objects List and then click on Switches.

14. From here I can see that it found both of my Nexus switch’s and it shows me the various information for them.  Pretty Cool….but wait…there is more

15. Now under the Objects Tab, click on Hosts and let’s go check out a vSphere Physical Host, in this case I’m going to pick Lotus.

16.Look at the pretty picture!  I can see that ProSphere has put together that my vSphere Host, is connected into both switches and then connected into a VMAX array.  I can also see various information on the host as well but the net-net is I get a nice overview drawing of how my server is connected into my array.  At least as far as ProSphere can see. 

17. Now that I can see the host, switch and storage, I can view performance information on those device.  More pretty pictures !

 

So there you have it!!  Easy Peasy.  Just to recap:

We did the following:

• We defined what is in the SRM Suite.
• We went through a step by step process on “How to setup solutions enabler with SMI-S” as part of the process to get ProSphere to discovery the VNX and VMAX arrays.
• We went through the “How to install ProSphere 1.7”, process including how to start discovering the VNX arrays.
• We went through the process of discovering the vSphere Infrastructure.
• Finally, we added in the Cisco Nexus switches so that we could get true end to end topology and reporting. 

 

VERY COOL !! 

@vTexan