Arista discovery -- losing the management IP address

Greg Hubbard1
Kilo Guru

I am trying to find a way to work around a problem with discovery of Arista switches.  It appears that the Arista design includes a special management interface (Management1) but if this interface is added to a separate VRF it becomes invisible to normal SNMP queries.  According to Arista, the interface can be polled if the query uses a special community string format (i.e. "public@VRF").  I tested this, and it works, but it only provides a small amount of information.

No matter -- the problem I am having is that some switches contain no IP addresses for interfaces, and these are added to the CMDB "properly" with the IP address of the management interface in the right place.  Other switches are configured for redundancy, so they have an IP address on an interface to support the failover (such as 1.0.0.1 on primary and maybe 1.0.0.2 on the partner).  Discovery is finding these addresses the normal way.

When the discovery pattern finishes, it appears to have the IP address set correctly, but the device ends up in the CMDB with one of the failover addresses instead.  I *think* that this is happening in the identification/reconciliation phase -- the algorithm seems to be favoring IP addresses in the IP address list over the IP attribute set for the CI.

Does anyone else have any experience with Arista devices?  Have you seen this problem?  If so, what did you do about it?

GLH