How to Discover Virtual Networking Devices

[rhickey]

How are virtual networking devices such as PBXs, switches, and routers handled in Discovery? Are these virtualized devices supported in ServiceNow Discovery? If not, we would like to track this virtual attribute on these devices and are looking for guidance.

If this cannot be done through a discoverable method, would it be recommended to create our own virtual table and extend it to all networking devices?

[Ryan Zulli]

Hi Bobby,

From a Discovery perspective it does not matter if the network gear is virtual or physical, as long as we can access via SNMP.   That said, if there is some naming convention or IP block, or attribute on the device that denotes "virtual" we can populate a custom field to assist in filtering.   Otherwise you could create a custom table extending network gear.   As for relating the virtual device back to the physical, we do not handle this right now.

Let me know if this helps or if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

-Ryan

[rhickey]

Thank you Ryan! Do you happen to know if this feature will be in a future release?

Unfortunately, the virtual flag is our only method at this time of filtering these virtual devices as we are not there with naming conventions and not aware of an attribute that will differentiate between a physical and virtual device. Our initial plan is to go with a custom field extended to all configuration items in the CMDB and create a business rule that flags off the Is Virtual server field for Reporting purposes in the CMDB. This will give users one consolidated field to query for reporting virtual devices in a List View format. Is this the best approach for us at this time?

Thanks,

Bobby

[james wells]

We added a custom field isVirtual on Network Gear (after asking SN if that might be an issue in the future). The other significant hurdle with virtual network devices we found is that often there is no serial number or UUID so we had to lean on using Name. Identity rules needed updating and we had to confirm that devices would get unique names and avoid reuse.

[Pravin17]

Hi Team,

Is there a way if we can read The virtual device context ID (VDC ID) of Cisco Nexus devices using discovery to reach out to virtual network devices?

Regards,

Pravin