Problem with ESXI outside LAN

[jackomone]

Hello everyone, i just started with Zabbix and managed to install it on a Ubuntu VM. Got it to work in my office LAN almost entirely, just some more things to try and test.

I was wondering if i could monitor our servers outside our office, they are all ESXi free with some Windows Server VMs.
Installing the agent in the Windows VM was a breeze and got them working. The only problem i'm facing is get the ESXi hypervisor to communicate with my Zabbix server.

I have followed the instructions and created the various macros.

I have made NAT and firewall exceptions for port 10050 (does it use the same port as the agent or something completely different?) but all i'm getting from the 'discovery rules' in the 'VMware Template' is a 'Not supported' status and a 'Timeout was reached' info.

Is there something i'm missing here?

Thanks in advance!

[jackomone]

Any suggestions?

[tim.mooney]

I assume you're following the documentation from https://www.zabbix.com/documentation.../vm_monitoring , but there are a couple of different options presented there.

You mention "discovery", so I assume you are trying to discover your ESXi hypervisors using the templates for "Discovery". Discovery is powerful and fantastic for large enterprise environments, but it's inherently more complicated than manually creating a host and then applying a template to it. Since you're just getting started with Zabbix, my recommendation would be to start simple and work your way up to the more complicated stuff.

If you follow the other option listed on that page, you can manually create the ESXi host in Zabbix (instead of trying to discover it) and then apply a template like the "Template VM VMWare Hypervisor" to that host.

For that to work (and for discovery to work), the SOAP URL on your system needs to be reachable from your Zabbix server. Have you verified that it is? Have you verified that the username and password you're attempting to use (to log in via SOAP and gather the metrics needed by the template) actually work? Even if the login and password work, are they for a (hopefully service account) user that has access to the necessary metrics?

[jackomone]

Thank you very much for your response!

Yes, i am indeed following that page of the documentation.
The discovery worked well in the LAN so i thought it would work over the internet as well!

I have created a Host linked to the template "Template VM VMWare Hypervisor", created the four macros $USERNAME, $PASSWORD, $URL, $UUID like i did with the other ESXi servers.
When i go to the "Discovery Rules" tab in the host it gives me a red "i" button which says "Timeout was reached", so i assume it cannot reach the server on the other end.

Username for now is the usual 'root' and it does login succesfully via vcenter.

So here is my question, what ports i need to forward in order to make it work? I've tried with the ordinary 10050 but with no luck whatsoever (bare in mind that i do have a working host with Windows on the same network i'm trying to connect to and it is working flawlessly, with a different port obv).

[rdubya]

Did you ever make any headway here? I've inherited what should be a simple task of watching datastores on standalone ESXi hosts and have yet to see that work. Zabbix is 4.4, Esxi is 6.0 and last attempt was with https://github.com/pfoo/zabbix-esxi . Seems like it should be straightforward, maybe I'll just start a new thread.