Differentiating Discovery Identifiers for Physical vs Virtual Servers

[natedickson2]

Hi All,

I'm looking to see if anyone has come up with good Discovery identifiers for servers when you have a mix of both a physical and virtual environment.

1. Scenario 1 - Servers might move from Physical to Virtual. In this scenario, the hostname/IP stay the same but the serial number changes
2. • Desired behavior - In the scenario above we want a new CI to be created when a server is moved from physical to virtual so we do not want a match to be on Hostname/IP
3. Scenario 2 - AIX/Windows/Linux Virtual servers might move around to different hosts or be cloned during backup/upgrades.
4. • Desired Behavior - We want discovery to trigger off hostname/IP if a server is virtual so it updates the UUID(SerialNumber) in these situations and keeps a single record migrating between physical hosts
   • Note - We are talking to operations teams to see if there is a way to maintain UUID during Windows/Linux moves but would like to have a solution for discovery as well

As of today since maintaining asset data is a higher priority we have just been matching by Serial Number.  This preservers the asset records and we manually update and delete the Virtual CI duplicates.

Looking for recommendations on either our process or potentially a tool workaround to solve these scenarios.

Nate

[Vini]

Hi,

It's interesting question... 

 "correlation_id " on Hardware table# cmdb_ci_hardware is top most priority for Ci reconciliation. and next Serial number & Serial number type on Hardware table. the next level comparison is on server level tables.  so based on these identification rules creates new ci recoror update the existing ci.
 

Hope this helps better!!!

Thansk & Regards,

Vinil.

[doug_schulze]

For scenario #1 

I might suggest ensuring you have a process that changes the state of the physical device to retired than in the discovery identifier you can add an inclusion rule that measures said state and it will ignore the retired record and create the new device.

For the second, you can just have a new identifier on the AIX table that matches on the name and you should get what you are looking for.

[natedickson2]

The first suggestion makes sense if we can get our process to update names in these scenarios it might resolve both of them.

The second scenario applies to Windows and Linux as well when they move around or are upgraded we get some duplicates. We did actually do some separate AIX identifiers so the issue mainly applies to Windows and Linux where there is a mixed environment.

Nate

[Santhosh17]

Hi doug,

If we can alter the host name and remove the IP address, will discovery overwrite the serial numbers or will it create a new record.