Replacing Agents

With ESX 4.x, management agents and hardware monitoring and management agents run in the service console. With ESXi 5.0 and later, agents are implemented in other ways.

■	Management agents. VMware partners create management agents by using one of the vSphere APIs.

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Hardware agents. Developers use CIM (Common Information Model) agents. CIM is a standards-based approach to monitoring hardware resources. CIM output is readable by third-party management tools. The VMkernel can include both VMware CIM providers and Partner CIM providers. Use a vSphere Client logged in to a vCenter Server system to view hardware information including alarms. Use the vSphere Client extension framework or the vSphere CIM SDK for customization.

■	Infrastructure service agents. Administrators can use agents available in the ESXi Shell. Agents include hostd (host daemon), vpxa, NTP, syslog, SNMP, and so on. Use the vSphere SDK, vCLI commands, or ESXCLI commands to manage the agents.

Infrastructure Services for Production Environments 

Function	ESX	ESXi	Management
Time synchronization	NTP agent in service console	Built-in NTP service	vicfg-ntp command
Centralized log collection	Syslog agent in service console	Built-in Syslog service	esxcli system syslog commands vSphere Client
SNMP monitoring	SNMP agent in service console	Built-in SNMP service	esxcli system snmp command
Local access authentication	Active Directory (AD) agent in service console Built in Active Directory service	Built-in Active Directory service	vSphere Client vicfg-authconfig vCLI command.