Understanding Events And Alarms

You can edit events and alarms from the Dell Management Plug-in Management Center within Settings Events and Alarms. From this section you can select the Event Posting Level, enable Alarms for Dell Hosts, or Restore Default Alarms.

There are four Event Posting Levels.

Table 1. Event Posting Level Descriptions
Event Description
Do not post any Events Do not have the Dell Management Plug-in forward any events or alerts into related vCenters.
Post all Events Post all events, including informal events, that the Dell Management Plug-in receives from managed Dell hosts into related vCenters.
Post only Critical and Warning Events Posts only events with either Critical or Warning criticality into related vCenters.
Post only Virtualization-Related Critical and Warning Events Post Virtualization related events received from hosts into related vCenters. Virtualization related events are those that Dell has selected to be most critical to hosts running virtual machines.

When you configure your Events and Alarms, you can enable them. When enabled, critical hardware alarms can trigger the Dell Management Plug-in to put the host system into a maintenance mode, and in certain cases, migrate the virtual machines to another host system. The Dell Management Plug-in forwards events received from managed Dell hosts, and creates alarms for those events. Use these alarms to trigger actions from vCenter, like a reboot, maintenance mode, or migrate. For example, when a dual power supply fails and an alarm is created, the resulting action is to migrate the virtual machine on that machine to a new one.

A host enters or leaves maintenance mode only as when you request it. If the host is in a cluster when it enters maintenance mode, you are given the option to evacuate powered-off virtual machines. If this option is selected, each powered-off virtual machine is migrated to another host, unless there is no compatible host available for the virtual machine in the cluster. While in maintenance mode, the host does not allow deployment or power-on of a virtual machine. Virtual machines that are running on a host entering maintenance mode need to be either migrated to another host or shut down, either manually or automatically by VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS).

Any hosts outside of clusters, or in clusters without VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) enabled, could see virtual machines being shut down due to a critical event. DRS continuously monitors usage across a resource pool and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines according to business needs. Use clusters with DRS configured in conjunction with Dell Alarms to make sure that virtual machines are automatically migrated on critical hardware events. Listed in the details of the on screen message are any clusters on this vCenter instance that may be impacted. Confirm that the clusters are impacted before enabling Events and Alarms.

If you ever need to restore the default alarm settings, you can do so with the Reset Default Alarm button. This button is a convenience to restore the default alarm configuration without uninstalling and reinstalling the product. If any Dell alarm configurations have been changed since install, those changes are reverted using this button.

Related Tasks: