Inheriting 3 different companies’ worth of Virtual infrastructure is sometimes a giant PITA. This holds true especially when the 3 different companies all had multiple “admin’s” working at any given time without established standards for naming, setup, configuration, or even maintenance.

Some of the newly-installed VMWare equipment wasn’t showing up on my Nagios monitoring board. First step is to make sure that snmp is setup and actually running (hint, it was not).

I ended up at this auvik support site – and, if it wasn’t so expensive (our budget is about 1/3 of what it “should be” – I would be running this for monitoring of our infrastructure. Think of it as cloud prtg. https://support.auvik.com/hc/en-us/articles/206311526-How-to-enable-SNMP-on-a-VMware-ESXi-hypervisor#topic_esx6

Since we’re running ESXi 6.5 and 6.7 currently:

• SSH to your ESXi box using the root account
• esxcli system snmp set -r
• esxcli system snmp set -c YOURCOMMUNITY
• esxcli system snmp set -p 161
• esxcli system snmp set -L "City, State, Country"
• esxcli system snmp set -C noc@domain.tld
• esxcli system snmp set -e yes

Or, if you’re using ESXi 7:

• SSH to your ESXi box using the root account
• esxcli system snmp set --communities YOURCOMMUNITY
• esxcli system snmp set --enable true