Either SolarWInds completely overlooked this when changing how Virtualization Objects are added to Orion, or I am completely missing the setting to do this for us.
Previously you could just run a one hop Network Discovery with the vCenter server as the only IP address. You just had to put in valid VMware credentials and Everything would get brought in as Orion nodes and with the VMAN appliance integrated it would automatically marry the data up. You could even put in WMI and SNMP credentials on the appropriate pages of the Discovery wizard and it would even scan and bring in all of the VM's as well. It worked great for bulk adding all of our ESX hosts and VM's into Orion in one big swoop.
Now however, the page in the Discovery wizard where you used to put in the VMware credentials has been replaced by the "Add VMWare VCenter or Hyper-V Devices" button. Clicking this button exits you from the Discovery Settings wizard and takes you to the new Add Virtualization Objects page. I thought to myself, "OK, cool, so we just add the vCenter server and it will now automatically add the ESX Hosts in for us. I hope it also adds in the VM's like the old Discovery Wizard does too, but as long as it at least gets the Hosts I'll be happy.". I figured surely they wouldn't overlook that, right?
Well, they did... Adding the vCenter server this way only brings the vCenter server in as an Orion node. The ESX hosts are only brought into Orion as "Orion VMAN" nodes. This means the hosts are not pinged by Orion every 2 minutes, they are not polled for additional metrics like CPU, SNMP, HARDWARE HEATLH, or any of the other data that Orion gathers. It also means you can't assign custom property values to them or anything. This is a HUGE miss by SolarWinds. We have nearly 300 ESX hosts between our two vCenters. Clicking on each one individually and choosing "Manage This Node" is just not feasible.
The only other thing I can think to do would be to do a SWQL\SQL query to get a list of all the ESX Host IP's from the VIM.Hosts table, then run a "Ping Only" discovery against that list of IP's. It should marry them up once brought in (I hope). This is a pain though and is a big step backwards compared to how it used to work.
Luckily I had two Discovery Profiles saved that are setup the way I described above. Running them worked just like it used to and brought in all the VMware Hosts and VM's as both Orion and Orion VMAN nodes. But what if these profiles ever get deleted? What if we get a new vCenter server that I need to Discover?
Please SolarWinds, tell me you have a function built somewhere that replaces the features I listed above? We are a large environment, so when you remove functionality that allowed us to bulk manage things in Orion that really hampers us and makes our job harder. What is SolarWinds vision for Orion VMAN with regards to monitoring hosts? Do you intend for your users to just have to click on each host individually to manage them as Orion Nodes? Do you intend for us to only manage them as VMAN Nodes and thus no longer get hardware health or other important data that is collected by Orion core? I just don't understand how such a major thing was overlooked? I scoured the admin guides and documentation last night and could not find a single word about adding hosts in (other than adding standalone esx hosts). Our use case is not unique by any stretch of the imagination, so how are other users handling this? I really don't get it at all. It is baffling to me how this oversight exists... Or, like I said, maybe I'm just missing something. I sincerely hope that is the case.
