HP Proliant Gen8 Agentless Management floods ESXi and vCenter Logs

Hewlett-Packard introduced a new component called HP Agentless Management within their Gen8 Series. This feature is extensible though an agent running inside the operating system, in that case the ESXi Host. The package (hp-ams) is included in all customized VMware images provided by HP and the HP ESXi Offline Bundles. Unfortunately this package create some issues caused by excessive local logins. This might pointlessly blow up the database and logfiles. You can check that problem by opening the Event-Log provided by the ESXi Host which is flooded with the following messages:

User root@127.0.0.1 logged in as
User root@ logged out (login time: , number of API invocations: , user agent: )
User root@127.0.0.1 logged in as
User root@ logged out (login time: , number of API invocations: , user agent: )

In this post i am going to show how to workaround this issue and remove the hp-ams from you ESXi Host, and how to build a new image without that package.

What is this Service good for?
Prior to remove that service you should know what the hp-ams package is good for and why you would need a contradictory thing like a "Agentless Managent Agent". Without this agent, there a missing some minor features: OS and driver information passed to the iLO and a feature to log iLO events to Guest OS logs. I do not really need that features, so disabling the service is not a problem. To get more information about that service check this document.

Manually disable hp-ams Service
You can easily stop the hp-ams Service to test the impact. This change is active immediately and does not persist a reboot. You do not have to enable Maintenance Mode:

root@esx01.virten.local:~ $ /etc/init.d/hp-ams.sh stop

Remove hp-ams Package
To make this change persistent across reboots you have to remove the hp-ams package. This change requires a reboot:

root@esx01.virten.local:~ $ esxcli software vib remove -n hp-ams
Removal Result
   Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
   Reboot Required: true
   VIBs Installed:
   VIBs Removed: Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_hp-ams_500.9.3.5-02.434156
   VIBs Skipped:

Create an ESXi Image and Depot without hp-ams with PowerCLI
You have to download HP Customized ESXi Image (Choose the .zip Depot File).

Add-EsxSoftwareDepot C:\tmp\VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-Update1-1065491-HP-5.50.26-depot.zip

New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile HP-ESXi-5.1.0-standard -Name "HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams"

Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams -SoftwarePackage hp-ams

Compare-EsxImageProfile HP-ESXi-5.1.0-standard HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams

Export-EsxImageProfile -ExportToIso -ImageProfile HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams -FilePath c:\tmp\HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams.iso
Export-EsxImageProfile -ExportToBundle -ImageProfile HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams -FilePath c:\tmp\HP-ESXi-5.1.0-U1-no_ams.zip

Find ESXi Hosts with hp-ams by using PowerCLI
This small PowerCLI Script checks the vCenter for ESXi Hosts with the hp-ams package installed:

Get-VMHost | Sort Name | Foreach {
  $ESXCLI = Get-EsxCli -VMHost $_ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
  $ESXCLI.software.vib.list() | Where { $_.Name -like "hp-ams"} | Select @{N="VMHost";E={$ESXCLI.VMHost}}, Name, Version
}