Virtual servers in CMDB

[soc_assetmanage]

All,

We would like to get some feedback on best-practice and tried methods on several CMDB-related questions.

Second one: What would be (conceptually and in practice) the best way to add Virtual servers to the ServiceNow CMDB. Virtual Instance does not seem to be the appropriate Ci Class, as it does not contains   all required Server-attributes to succesfully manage servers.

• Should Ci Class "Servers" contain both physical as virtual servers?
• How does Virtual Instances come into play? Are the virtual instances = virtual servers, or are they an additional VMWare layer in between and should Servers with flag Virtual = True be linked to the Virtual Instance they run on? And that, in turn, linked to the ESX server (or ESX cluster).

• We would go for the above, were it not for underlying Assets. For every server Ci, an underlying Asset is created. And this would make no sense for Virtual servers.
• The other way around, it would make no sense that Ci owners would only see the physical servers and none of the virtual ones, when browsing the Windows Servers section.
• Finally: what is the best practice method for dealing with physical to virtual migrations of servers. If we would just change the virtual-flag from a server from False to True, this would be very misleading. Should we create a new Server Ci or Virtual Instance and adapt the old one. It might get a new purpose / hostname etc.

Thank you for sharing your ServiceNow experience,

Regards,

Kenny

[Sanjeev Kumar1]

Hi Kenny,

I am also working with CMDB and same question come up in my mind also.

We are going to implement it in following way.

1. Yes CI Class "Servers" content both physical and Virtual Servers.

2. All Virtual Server must have a relationship with one physical server ( ESX - Server)

so if any server which have relation like "Hosted on" ( on Some ESX server ) is vertual server.

So All ESX - server also come into CI Class "Servers" and all virtual servers also come in   "Servers" but they have some relationship.

Thanks,

Sanjeev Kumar

[soc_assetmanage]

Thank you for your quick reply, Sanjeev!

So if I am correct, you do not use Virtual Instances at all? (or do you only have them to keep track of VMWare license compliancy?)

And I keep wondering, how do you deal with underlying Assets for Virtual servers:

• For every new server Ci, an underlying (physical) Asset is created. And this would make no sense for Virtual servers.

Regards,

Kenny

[mduluk]

You can modify the create asset on insert business rule to not create an asset if the 'is virtual' filed is true.  

[jecox11]

we've addressed this by using an asset strategy of Don't Create Assets