Enabling SNMP on ESXi hosts

I wanted to enable SNMP on our ESXi hosts for monitoring via Solarwinds. Here’s what I did. (I am doing this kind of generically, using variables etc, so I can script the thing for multiple hosts).

First I connected to the vCenter Server from PowerCLI.

Next I got its ESXCLI object. This will let me run ESXCLI commands against the host.

To view the current status of SNMP you can do can invoke a get() method –

Nothing’s configured currently. To configure something we can use the set() method. From the definition of this method we can see it takes a whole bunch of parameters –

Here’s what I did to configure SNMP. I want a community string of “public”, enable SNMP, and specify two trap destinations.

The result of that will either be a true or false. The get() method can be used again to confirm it is set correctly. And the test() method can be used to test it works –

Now Solarwinds will be able to poll the host via SNMP.

To do this en-masse on all your hosts the following should help –

Shout out to this VMware blog post which helped a lot and has more info.

The above script failed on some of our ESX hosts with the following error –

Turns out these hosts only accept 16 parameters instead of 17 (the one called largestorage is missing). Not sure why. All our hosts are ESXi 5.5 but am thinking the problem ones are perhaps not using the HP customized version of ESXi.

Anyways, so I modified my script above to take care of this –

Also, just for my own info – the $null above means the parameter is not set. If that parameter already has a value on the server it is not over-written. To over-write or blank out the existing value replace $null with "".