Installing Zabbix on Vmware ESX 5.1

[Vyper007]

Hi All,

I'm attempting to install the Zabbix Pre built appliance on VMWARE ESX 5.1. The appliance provide a VMX and a VMDK file so I'd have thought I'd have no problems installing the new machine.

I've got as far as building the machine but when go to power it on I get an error about Vmware doesn't support SUSE64. I've tried upgrading the virtual hardware to the latest version but alas I still get the error.

Any ideas ?

[steveboyson]

ESX 5.1 of course does support SUSE64. It is the disk format which is not supported. If you have a licensed ESXi, try a storage migration of your VM to a different datastore (you have one, right?).

Otherwise, you've to use VMware converter to convert the disk (vmdk) to ESXi format.

[Vyper007]

Cheers, I used the converter to convert the disk and that worked. I've gotta say though Zabbix like many other free linux based monitoring systems looks a bit of a mess. I'm trialling the product in the hopes of replacing a really old monitoring solution we're using. But installing agents, setting up checks, and even installing the servers itself should not be hard work. I just tried to install the agent yesterday on a Windows 2008 64 bit server, of course double clicking an exe was too much to ask and it seems I've got to go to some ridiculous lengths of dropping to command line.

Why can't monitoring just be easy, I shouldn't have to learn shell scripts, and command line GUI's, we live in a computing age where drag and drop should be the order of business.

Don't get me wrong I count my blessing this works at all, after all I can hardly complain about the price. But theres a real gap in the market for a simple out of the box monitoring suite.

Rant over ....

Thanks for the advise guys.

[aib]

For Windows monitoring use Spiceworks.
It's free, full of nice stuff and have a lot of annoying banner (because it's free).

Zabbix - it's a monitoring tool for complicated configuration which include Windows, Unix, Network devices, Firewalls, UPS, and other stuff which don't like to share his internal information about health and performance with anybody else (exclude Zabbix guru with big hammer-of-CLI).

Cheers! And Have a nice time in the world of free-and-colorfull-and-bells-and-whistles-and-useless Windows monitoring program.

[steveboyson]

Haha, nice reply @aib