My Zenoss install has been working quite well, especially for monitoring Linux servers.  The /Server/Linux device class works great with net-snmp on Linux hosts.  Windows monitoring is also working very nicely with SNMP Informant as the agent.

The next challenge is to make Zenoss work with ESXi 5.1 hosts.  ESXi 5.1 has an SNMP agent installed, but no useful information can be grabbed using this agent.  We have to use the esxtop Zenpack to effectively monitor ESXi hosts.  This Zenpack will use the resxtop command instead of SNMP to fetch information.

The resxtop command has to be installed into the Zenoss server via installing the vSphere CLI.  The installation file can be downloaded from the VMware website.  As of the time of writing, the latest vCLI version is 5.1 U1.

I am using instructions from the Zenoss Core Extended Monitoring Guide.

First, install OpenSSL development package.

# yum install openssl-devel

Then, download the vCLI and unpack.

# tar xzvf VMware-vSphere-CLI-5.1.0-1060453.x86_64.tar.gz

Now, run the installer.

# cd vmware-vsphere-cli-distrib
# ./vmware-install.pl

....
CPAN module not installed on the system.
CPAN module is required to install missing pre-requisite Perl modules. Please
install CPAN.

Apparently, something called CPAN needs to be installed.  A yum search shows a package called perl-CPAN, so let’s install that, and restart the vCLI installation.

# yum install perl-CPAN

# ./vmware-install.pl
Please wait while configuring CPAN ...

Please wait while configuring perl modules using CPAN ...

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "Archive::Zip" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "Compress::Zlib" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"Compress::Raw::Zlib" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "Crypt::SSLeay" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"IO::Compress::Base" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"IO::Compress::Zlib::Constants" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"Class::MethodMaker" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "HTML::Parser" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "UUID" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "Data::Dump" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "SOAP::Lite" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "URI" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "XML::SAX" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"XML::NamespaceSupport" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"XML::LibXML::Common" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "XML::LibXML" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module "LWP" .

CPAN is downloading and installing pre-requisite Perl module
"LWP::Protocol::https" .

CPAN not able to install following Perl modules on the system. These must be
installed manually for use by vSphere CLI:

Archive::Zip 1.28 or newer
Compress::Zlib 2.037 or newer
Compress::Raw::Zlib 2.037 or newer
Crypt::SSLeay 0.55 or newer
IO::Compress::Base 2.037 or newer
IO::Compress::Zlib::Constants 2.037 or newer
Class::MethodMaker 2.10 or newer
HTML::Parser 3.60 or newer
UUID 0.03 or newer
Data::Dump 1.15 or newer
SOAP::Lite 0.710.08 or newer
URI 1.37 or newer
XML::SAX 0.16 or newer
XML::NamespaceSupport 1.09 or newer
XML::LibXML::Common 0.13 or newer
XML::LibXML 1.63 or newer
LWP 5.805 or newer
LWP::Protocol::https 5.805 or newer

Oh boy.  I’ll figure this one out later.