How to incorporate VxRail and vBlock instances into CMDB

[theroz]

Our company is running a highly virtualized environment using VMware. Our virtualization team wants to create change requests and pick the primary CI as a VxRail instance. However, we are unable to find any object in CMDB (even under the vCenter instance) that accurately describes a VxRail. I'm wondering how people in other companies using similar virtualization technology document these items such as VxRail and vBlock. Thanks for any input. 

[Rajesh Kannan]

Hi ,

I see ESX servers in Nutanix discovered using vCenter discovery.  If your ESX server in VxRail instance connected to vCenter, then those ESX servers discovered during vCenter discovery.

Documentation for VMWare vCenter discovery:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/concept/c_DiscoveryForVMwareVCenter.html

Regards,

Rajesh.

[theroz]

Thanks for your reply! We do have vCenter discovery active and picking up ESX servers. However, we are unable to find a CI for VxRail which houses multiple ESX servers and associated VSAN storage, etc. In their situation, they are applying firmware updates to the actual chassis, so they are wanting the whole rack with multiple ESX servers in it. We're trying to figure out how to capture that in CMDB.

[vNick]

We don't yet have those type of HCI classes built out, but you could extend the CMDB to capture those encapsulating objects.  You might look at the Server Chassis class in terms of an encapsulating entity that would house the ESX servers, etc.  You would have to extend the out of the box discovery as we don't find the VxRail chassis or the many components of a vBlock.  vBlock would probably be closer to out of the box capabilities except for the management stack that comes with it.

[Ankush13]

VxRail and vBlock information isn't discoverable right now. You would need to manually populate that data in the CMDB after creating a dedicated class.