SNMPv3 Configuration on ESXi 5.5/HP NNMi

Hey All,

I know there is a lot of discussion on the topic of SNMP on the Community Board and out on the internet, but I haven't yet been able to find anything that's helped. I'm trying to get SNMPv3 working with auth/priv on my ESXi 5.5 hosts. I can get it working just fine with v2, but as soon as I introduce the auth and priv components, it shows up in NNMi as "No SNMP". Today, I tried v3 with no auth and priv and still no-go. We've opened tickets with both VMware and HP and they just point their finger at each other.

I've followed the process below, which is from the VMware Blog site:

There are 8 steps (not all are applicable):

1. Set the engine Id (need to convert string to hexidecimal string)
2. Set the authentication protocol which either beSHA1,MD5ornone
3. Set the privacy protocol which can beAES128ornone
4. Generate the authentication and privacy hash from the user supplied passwords if either protocols were enabled. You can either provide a file that has the password or use the -r flag which specifies the raw input password
5. Configure an SNMP user and associating the authentication and privacy hash from the previous step
6. Set the SNMP target which includes the port and user
7. Enable SNMP service on the ESXi host
8. Validate SNMP configuration by performing a test operation

esxcli system snmp set –engineid 766d77617265

esxcli system snmp set –authentication SHA1

esxcli system snmp set –privacy AES128

esxcli system snmp hash -r -A secret1234 -X secret5678

esxcli system snmp set –users william/f9f7311379046ebcb5d134439ee5b7754da8a90f/d300f16eec59fb3b7ada7844ff764cbf4641fe5f/priv (I used the hash values for the secrets I used)

esxcli system snmp set –v3targets pod23-esx-01a.pml.local@161/william/priv/trap

esxcli system snmp set –enable true

esxcli system snmp test

We can get the snmpwalk to work, but there is something with the credentials that it doesn't seem to like. In my username, I'm using all uppercase letters with one underscore and for the password I'm using a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters and special characters. In my research on the internet, I've found that Solarwinds users are reporting that they also cannot get SNMPv3 to work with 5.5. Has anyone here gotten v3, using auth and priv, to work on ESXi 5.5? Am I missing something in my configuration?

Thanks,

Jeff