One awesome way to monitor ESX/vSphere infrastructures by SCOM is using the Veeam MP 6.x. This MP uses collectors to talk to the ESX/vSphere infrastructure, collect data from the physical infrastructure as well as from virtual machines and submit those to SCOM. After the discovery the virtualization platform is boradly monitored. But there are cases where monitoring virtual machines on the platform is irrelevant and not needed (maybe if you act as a IaaS service provider). The only focus in this situation is the virtualization platform. Read on if you want to know how to disable the monitoring of virtual machines on specific ESX/vSphere hosts.

Stefan over at http://blog.scomfaq.ch has already published some great articles on how to setup and configure the Veeam MP (Versions 5.x and 6.x). So I will not go into any details here. Read these posts for more details:

http://blog.scomfaq.ch/2012/08/01/scom-2012-veeam-mp-for-vmware-5-7-part-1-setup-config/
http://blog.scomfaq.ch/2012/08/14/scom-2012-veeam-mp-for-vmware-5-7-part-2-overview/
http://blog.scomfaq.ch/2013/04/18/scom-2012-veeam-mp-for-vmware-6-0-part-1-upgrade/

The way to get to the goal is easy and straightforward. You just need to disable the object discovery that discovers virtual machines on ESX/vSphere hosts. The override configuration can be targeted at either a specific ESX/vSphere host or a group. In this example I will create a group that will be filled up with objects. For those objects virtual machines will not be discovered anymore and will therefore not be monitored.

Virtual machines are not directly related to ESX/vSphere hosts. All virtualization hosts contain a “VM Discovery Container” object and this object will contain the virtual machines. That means we have to disable the object discovery for the “VM Discovery Containers” of the ESX/vSphere hosts that we don’t want to discover and monitor virtual machines. Select this object type in the picker and select the containers of the specific servers.

Close the configuration window. Now it’s time to override the object discovery for the virtual machines. Look for the discovery called “Veeam Stage 2 – Virtual Machine Discovery” and create a new override for the group we prepared in the last step.

Set the “Enabled” property to “false”.

Now close the configuration window. No new virtual machines will be discovered on the group members. However, if the object discovery already discovered virtual machines before it has been disabled, those object instances are not automatically removed from SCOM. They must be removed by using the Remove-SCOMDisabledClassInstance cmdlet.

After that “cleanup step”, the virtual machines on the specified hosts are gone and will not be monitored again.

Cheers
Marcel