fields in the Serial Number table

[Dean12]

As part of our conversion from physical to virtual servers, we have server records that have the same name but different serial numbers. As an example, we may have a record in the cmdb_ci_win_server table for servername1, serialnumber-physical and another record for servername1, serialnumber-virtual. The physical server has been retired and is no longer on the network. For a few (not all) of our server records with the same name and different serial numbers, the serial number was updated on the wrong record. In other words, the wrong record was updated. The record with the physical server serial number was updated with the virtual server serial number. The log said the Identifier Serial Number Table & Class Name found the match. That is confusing to me.

Two point on this. One, on the examples where the serial number was changed on the wrong record, we had retired the physical server and replaced it with a virtual sever without creating a new record for the virtual server. That was probably a bad process to follow on our part. Discovery updated the serial number on the physical record with the virtual serial number because the Identifier Name & Class Name found a match on the name and no match on the serial number. I expected that. After this happened we manually changed the serial number on that record back to the physical serial number and manually created the record for the virtual serial number. My thought was that Discovery would run and update the newly created virtual server record, but it did not. It updated the original record.

Point two, the serial number table has records for both the physical and virtual server. The record for the physical server has the 'absent'=true and the virtual server record has the 'absent'=false. Is this causing the wrong record to be updated? What updates the 'absent' field, and when is it updated?

Also, I have a couple of related questions about the serial number table. What is the 'valid' field used for and when is it updated? How is the 'serial number type' field used?

[doug_schulze]

Dean,

Sounds like your identifiers my not be setup to handle these situations.. Can you send me an e-mail with your instance and servers in question and I can take a look...

Once we work it out I'll post an update to the answers..