Goobye ISEE: Monitoring an EVA with RSP: day 1

I have deferred upgrading the monitoring of my EVAs to RSP until Q1 2009 since I had a great deal of trouble with RSP last fall and was fed up.

HP Services proposed coming to help me (we have 6 EVAs and 6 SMSes), but I thought I'd try for myself for the first one to at least understand what they'll be doing, and be able to troubleshoot it once they're gone.

To increase my chances, I decided to start everything from scratch on the CMS and SMS. As far as these two servers are concernd, it doesn't get as "standard" as this:

• The SIM administrator and me installed SIM 5.2 on a freshly reinstalled Windows server, then we restored our database succesfully (see one of my previous post for my recommendations on this)
• I completely zapped my test SMS and reinstalled a vanilla Windows 2003 Enterprise, along with CV 6.0.2 and nothing more (we stick with 6.0.2 since it's the only version certified with Metrocluster).

Now does it work? Partly.

• SIM must have at least spoken to SMI-S, since EVAs appeared automagically in the system list. But there's not much information I can get from them.
• As the RSP "prerequisite" documentation that explains how to set everything up has no fucking example screenshot, who knows if the EVA entries in SIM are supposed to be in this state or not. Message to whoever's writing these guides: I'm sure you are allowed to put images there. Please do it!!!
• WEBES is still not able to communicate with CV since it sees the server as a generic "Proliant", and not a "CommandView Server". Is it because I'm running on a generic server instead of a real SMS? Maybe, but a generic server is officially supported. I don't know how to change this yet. More work needs to be done.

Since there are still problems and SIM 5.3 has just been released last Monday along with WEBES 5.4, I'll try to have SIM upgraded first and start from there. This will probably be the last straw. If it still doesn't work, I'm converting my SSSU monitoring script to a nagios plugin and I'll give it for free to everyone who's interested. If HP is happy to give me crappy software that doesn't work, then I'll let them handle the overhead paying a human to manage the service calls that I'll log manually. I just wasted too much time and energy on this.