Discovery: Virtual Servers vs Virtual Machine Instance

[kmlutz]

Hello All,

We have recently rolled out Discovery to our production environment.   We are starting with our main data centers and mostly targeting infrastructure items such as servers.

We are comparing the results from Discovery to our homegrown CMDB.

One thing we have noticed relates to "virtual" servers and vCenter.

In our homegrown system, the team has entries listed as virtual servers but when Discovery collects the data on these entries - they are listed only as a Virtual Machine Instance and have no record in the virtual server class.

I have reviewed the WIKI and it seems like it may have to do with how these servers are created within vCenter...possibly because a template is used to "build" this entries.

Can someone provide a specific distinction between a virtual server and virtual machine instance and how Discovery makes that distinction?

Thanks.

[pratiksha5]

If we get an alert on the ci. The names are same but one is windows server and other is virtual mc instance. What should be the behavior? The CI is not getting populated in the incident. 

[pratiksha5]

If we get an alert on the ci. The names are same but one is windows server and other is virtual mc instance. What should be the behavior? The CI is not getting populated in the incident. 

[doug_schulze]

Kurt,   you can have the instance and now instantiated server if you have just discovered the vCenter environment and not the host that is being virtualized in the first place.   There are two sides that need to be discovered for it all to fit, the hosts and the vCenter application that supports them all

[kmlutz]

Thanks Amit and Doug.   That helps clear it up in my mind.   It will help me explain it to our Configuration Management team that is trying to confirm that what is coming from Discovery matches up to what is listed in our homegrown CMDB.   Granted, there will be differences but this will help me point them to the right classes for that comparison!

[bhanupratap2203]

Hi Doug,

Hope you are doing good today!

We are discovering Servers through IP and vmware instance through vcenter discovery. But I can see there are lot of vmware instances which are not related to their servers(already dsicovered). So at the end I have some servers discovered and their VMware instance discovered through vcenter discovery , but they are not related with 'Instantiates::Instantiated by' relationship. This is working fine for rest of the 70% servers/vmware instances.

Please provide a reason behind this.