ESXi -> Win Server VM-> Agent

[BWentler]

Ok here are the details:

VMware 6.0 ESXi (free version)
VM's: Win Server 2012, Win Server 2016, CentOS/Zabbix, Linux/CyberPower Agent

Zabbix: CentOS 8, Zabbix 4.4

Host: I added the ESXI server Host and used the following templates: Template VM VMware, Template VM VMware Guest, Template VM VMware Hypervisor

Zabbix has found all the quest OS's and has auto added a Host for each guest/vm

I have installed the Zabbix agent on both the Win Server OS's

I tried to create a host for the Win Servers for the Zabbix agent but can't since the host already exist.

Now the questions:
1) Can I have the agent update the auto create Host's for the Win Servers?
2) Do I remove the auto created Host from ESXi and then manually create the Host for the Agent to talk to?
3) Do I un-install the Agent on the Win Server's since this will not work?

Thank you?

[Markku]

I personally like the template in https://www.zabbix.org/wiki/Esxi_standalone_template , customized to fit my needs. It creates the discovered VMs with names like "vmname (Guest nn)" where nn is some internal number in ESXi, so that the host names do not overlap with my manually created hosts. Thus I have two separate Zabbix hosts for each VM (or most of them): one created by the ESXi template discovery (to gather the data from the hypervisor) and one created by myself, with whatever templates I assigned manually (to gather the data from the agent inside the VM).

[BWentler]

Sorry for the delayed reply.

I am very new to Zabbix, Markku could explain, provide examples, etc, to what your "customization's" to the "Esxi_standalone_template" are?

Thank you,

[Markku]

I would say that I did the same as always when downloading a template: checked that the items as useful for me, disable or delete useless items, adjust the item intervals (maybe using macros like {$I_VMWARE_INTERVAL} so that I can customize the interval for some hosts if needed), add some useful graphs, and so on.

Just download the template and compare to the bundled 4.4 templates to consider if that works better for you. But anyway, I like to collect some statistics from the ESXi and some statistics from inside the VM (using Zabbix agent), and in that case the differing host names work better for me.

Markku