Distinguish physical and virtual servers

[garychanyw]

Hi,

I have physical and virtual servers in my environment and they have different antivirus application (running as Windows services). May I know how to auto discover them as physical or virtual then assign to different template?

[tcilmo]

Hi,

I have physical and virtual servers in my environment and they have different antivirus application (running as Windows services). May I know how to auto discover them as physical or virtual then assign to different template?

Sounds like you want to configure an auto-registration action. There are three ways to do this.

1. Host metadata - Specify unique metadata in the agent config for host types.
2. Host name - Host names will require a string to differentiate between types.
3. proxy - Use proxy's, VM's on proxy A and physicals on proxy B.

What ever way you choose, you can then have a template auto applied.

[LenR]

Look at item system.hw.chassis[], vmware has a prefix, I think hyperv does also.

We install facter on Linux and use it to get the serial number via userparameter, but I don't remember why we chose that method, it's almost 10 years old.

[bbrendon]

You're probably better off going for something that doesn't require the agent to run as root.

sudo dmidecode -s baseboard-manufacturer
sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name

or cat files in /sys/devices/virtual/dmi/id

[LenR]

I guess that's why we use facter, and we were probably on 1.8.

[garychanyw]

Hi Tcilmo,

1) how to do? I have HostMetadataItem=system.uname in my conf file
2) Same naming standard for physical and virtual servers, so cannot distinguish.
3) Not preferred...

Thanks

[garychanyw]

Hi BBrendon,

Can you explain more in detail?

Gary

[LenR]

On Linux, we install facter (https://puppet.com/blog/facter-part-1-facter-101) on all systems, then:

UserParameter=local.facter[*],sudo /usr/bin/facter $1

sudoers.d: %zabbix ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/facter

Item keys local.facter[virtual], local.facter[serialnumber]

facter virtual will return virtual or physical, serialnumber on vm's will have a prefix.

On windows: item for serial number w/ key
wmi.get["root\cimv2","SELECT serialnumber FROM Win32_BIOS"]

Sample trigger logic:
{Template Windows VMWare and OpenManage Services:wmi.get["root\cimv2","SELECT serialnumber FROM Win32_BIOS"].str(VMware)}=1 and {Template Windows VMWare and OpenManage Services:service_state[VMTools].last()}>0

[garychanyw]

system.hw.chassis key is not supported in Windows

[LenR]

system.hw.chassis needs root authority to work in Linux. I didn't notice that when I mentioned it above, I've never used it. I wouldn't want my entire zabbix agent to run as root, sudo access to specific commands like I have above grant only the root access needed.

[garychanyw]

can we check the existence of a file?
e.g. for virtual server, VMWare tool is installed so there some VMWare tool files exist; And there is no such files in physical server

[LenR]

Yes, but we had the chicken/egg problem. We used the method above using factor to make sure our VM's had vmware tools running. At that time, we were doing a lot of P2V migrations.

You can also check for the tools service or processes.

[garychanyw]

Hi LenR,

Sorry I am new to Zabbix, can you advise how to check for file, tools service and process?