previously i believe i’d had to mess around with co-existing net-snmp (snmpd) along with the newer ESX snmp agent to get dell openmanage to work. specifically for vsphere 4.0…but i don’t think that is necessary anymore. correction: it is still necessary to get openmanage working properly, but the ESX snmp agent is fine for monitoring solutions such as orion.

quick way to setup snmp with just the new agent (from vMA):
vicfg-snmp –server <esxhost> –username root –password <password> -p 161 -c <SNMP community string> -t <destinationhost>@162/<community string>

to specify multiple destinations with -t use commas in between destinations

to enable, use the above command up to the –password portion and then use -E
to list current settings do the same, but use a -s

if you were messing around with net-snmp previously (like i was), you’ll need to stop the snmpd service and then run “chkconfig snmpd off” to insure the service does not auto-startup. otherwise you’ll have conflicts with the two services tying to run on port 161 udp. another option is making the ESX snmp agent run on a port other than 161.

for some reason “chkconfig” was not working for me to disable the service startup. i ended up taking off execute rights to /etc/init.d/snmpd.