check_esxi_hardware 20241129 released: Python2 is no longer supported, potentially last and final release...

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on November 29th 2024 - Listed in Hardware Monitoring VMware Python

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A new version of check_esxi_hardware, an open source monitoring plugin to monitor the hardware of VMware ESXi servers, is available.

Fix pkg_resources deprecation warning

The newest release tagged with version 20241129 fixes a deprecation warning when the plugin is executed with Python 3.12:

$ python3 check_esxi_hardware.py
/home/ck/Git/Napsty/check_esxi_hardware/check_esxi_hardware.py:302: DeprecationWarning: pkg_resources is deprecated as an API. See https://setuptools.pypa.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html
  import pkg_resources
no parameters specified

This was reported on GitHub by p-try in issue #72.

The reason why pkg_resources was used in the plugin, was to identify the pywbem module version. There were significant differences between the "original" pywbem 0.7 and newer releases. However pywbem 0.7 is nowhere shipped anymore, in current active Linux distributions.

EL8 for example ships python3-pywbem 0.11.0, Debian based distributions have completely removed the python3-pywbem package (can only be installed using pip now). The last Ubuntu LTS was 18.04 (Bionic) which shipped pywbem 0.8.0.

It was therefore decided to completely remove the version lookup for pywbem 0.7, which required the pkg_resources module. 

Removed Python2 support

At the same time we have also reached a time where all currently supported Linux LTS releases fully support Python3 - most of them even fully removed Python2.

Starting from now on, with plugin version 20241129, only Python3 is and will be supported.

If your monitoring system still has no Python3 installed and you must remain on a very old legacy system only supporting Python2 (reaaallyy?!), then remain on check_esxi_hardware.py version 20221230.

The requirements in the documentation has been updated accordingly.

Is this the last update on the check_esxi_hardware plugin?

Even prior to Broadcom acquiring VMware, it was announced that the CIM server in ESXi 8.x is marked as deprecated. In the meantime this has been confirmed by Broadcom and the next major release (ESXi 9.x) will no longer support the CIM service to display the physical hardware components and their status (HealthState or OperationalStatus). See the plugin FAQ for more information.

As the purpose of check_esxi_hardware is to query the CIM server running on an ESXi server, it may very well be the last release of the check_esxi_hardware monitoring plugin - unless there is a major bug or security issue discovered.

In case this really is the last version I release, let me use this post as a pre-goodbye. It was an honor to maintain the plugin since 2010, for more than 14 years. I hope the plugin has served you, the community, well and helped you detect hardware issues before major outages.

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