Why, when discovering a Virtual machine instance, does discovery create a "Computer" record and a "Windows Server" record as well as the "Virtual Machine Instance"?

lharrison · ‎11-07-2014

When discovering VMware using ServiceNow Discovery, I get several records created for a single device.

Sometimes it can be a Computer, Windows Server and a VMware Virtual Instance or other times it's just the Windows Server and VMware Virtual Instance records.

Excuse my ignorance if there's an easy answer to this.

Thanks, in advance

Larissa

anders9 · ‎11-12-2014

Hello Larissa,

There are two sides to the discovery here. One is the vCenter discovery that will connect to the vCenter API and collect information about the VMware environment such as ESX servers, resource pools and virtual machine instances. Generalising a little the virtual machine instance is a VMware configuration which could run an operating system and contains a UUID which is a unique identifier.

The other side of discovery here is the "operating system" discovery and in your case when discovery finds the Windows server running extracting information such as os version, cpu, ram, etc. If it's a VMware environment it will match the serial number with the UUID and link the two CIs together.

Finally - I'm wondering if the case that you see a "computer" as well as a "windows server" is due to that the Windows Server table is extended from the computer table? I would expect these CIs to have the same "sys id" - so they're basically the same record.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Anders

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Daryll Conway · ‎11-20-2014

Our VMwareProbe is triggered and gets this result

<results error="Unable to establish connection to https://<ip address is here>/sdk: java.rmi.RemoteException: VI SDK invoke exception:java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out: connect" probe_time="21232">

anders9 · ‎12-16-2014

Hello Daryll,

Apologies - another long wait for a reply... I can't say I've seen that message before - do you know if the "SDK" is available on the vCenter environment?

Might want to log an incident with support and this can be tracked more efficiently! 🙂

Regards,

Anders

chrisdimo · ‎02-11-2015

I too get the same thing and eventually filtered out "VMware virtual machine instance" for users when selecting "affected items" in a change record as users were not sure what to select. Unfortunately though, that works well when there is a VMware record and a windows server record. if there is only a VMware record and that's being filtered out you are then stuck with a user saying that they cannot find the ci.

lharrison · ‎11-02-2015

I'm having that exact same issue, Chris and then someone goes and creates another CI when the original one was there all along! Auditing is a nightmare!

Phil32 · ‎03-14-2017

I'm happy to have the Virtual Machine, Server, and DNS CIs; but I don't understand why discovery isn't automatically relating all of them together.