When using Microsoft System Center to manage VMware infrastructures you will very fast get in contact with the awesome SCOM management pack from Veeam. If you want to know more on how to install and configure this MP, you should take a look at this blog post over at scomfaq.ch. When you follow these steps you will have your VMware infrastrucure components fully discovered and monitored in SCOM. To use them from a service management perspective, we now need to bring them over to the Service Manager CMDB. Read on to learn how it works.
One important thing to know about this MP is that the classes are not the same compared to older versions of the MP. Veeam has rewritten most of the MP and tried to get rid of the old nworks names, id’s etc. That means that you have to take some extra steps when you already have Veeam MP 5.x in action. From a SCOM point of view, you will have to delete the old MPs and import the new ones. This will rediscover all the VMware objects. When syncing those to SCSM, this will generate new CIs in parallel to the old ones. Before deleting the old CI’s make sure you migrate the relevant information to the new CI’s.
Now let’s talk about bringing over the objects to the CMDB (without taking care of the old MP versions). First of all we need to import the appropriate MPs from the Veeam MP V6 into Service Manager. I imported the following two MPs:
Now we have to configure the SCOM connector and select the MPs that we want to sync over from SCOM. All objects that SCOM discovered so far will be brought over to the CMDB. I choose all MPs that I imported in step 1.
After running a full connector sync it’s time to create the appropriate views. Because we imported the MPs we have some classes available that might house interesting objects. Here are some class examples (display names) for which I created views.
- VMware vSphere Host
- VMware Virtual Machine
- VMware Virtual Switch
- VMware Datastore
- VMware Cluster
Let’s check the result for objects of the view “All vSphere Hosts”.
(VMware vSphere hosts view)
(VMware vSphere host details using the generic form)
That’s it. If needed you can now start extending the classes of the Veeam MP to add additional data on these CIs.
Cheers
Marcel
marcelzehner.ch 
Hi Marcel,
Do you have any feedback on why it might better to discover VMware CI’s through the VEEAM MP and SCOM versus through Virtual Machine Manager? I believe VMM supports discovery of VMware CI’s as well but I’m not sure.
Talia
Hey
When you are using the Veeam MP in SCOM you will get much more details about the VMware infrastructure. SCVMM is limited to some basic CIs like Hosts, VMs etc.. If this is OK you are good to go, if you need more check out the classes that the Veeam MP delivers. And the end it’s just a question of what CI’s you need to support your processes.
Cheers
Marcel