Consolidated hosts

Consolidated hosts are discovered hosts on the network that comprise collaborating or virtual hosts that can be grouped into their host containers or clusters. The consolidation of these hosts is managed by standard Pattern Language patterns. This topic discusses types of consolidated hosts supported by BMC Discovery.

Consolidation of Starfire domains

The large Oracle Sun Enterprise servers are modeled as a physical device (the partitioned host), which acts as a container for a number of logical devices (individual servers, as seen on the network). BMC Discovery discovers the logical devices, and pattern modules consolidate these logical devices into physical devices.
Sun Enterprise 10000

The physical device is not directly discovered for Sun Enterprise 10000 servers. However, each logical device has details of its physical server, the SSP host name, which is used to create or update the physical host node representing the physical device in the datastore. The name given to the Sun Enterprise 10000 physical host is the SSP hostname.

Sun Fire servers

The physical device is not directly discovered for Sun Fire servers. However, using the last number of the IP address, the host ID can be decremented to determine the host ID of the system controller. This is used to assign logical devices to physical devices and is also used as the host name of the physical device.

Domain information referred to in the manufacturer's documentation

IP address	Example host ID	Domain
10.1.1.1	82a8aaa3	System Controller
10.1.1.2	82a8aaa4	A
10.1.1.3	82a8aaa5	B
...	...	...
10.1.1.19	82a8aab5	R

Patterns are provided to consolidate the following machines:

Sun Enterprise 10000 - E10K
Sun Fire 12000 - F12K
Sun Fire 15000 - F15K
Sun Fire 20000 - F20K
Sun Fire 25000 - F25K

Consolidation of discovered virtual hosts into parent hosts

Where a number of virtual hosts are present on one machine (they are seen as individual IP devices) they are consolidated into a single parent host (also seen as an IP device).

Solaris 10 Zones
VMware VMs

This creates a group of SIs, which are linked to the virtual hosts.

Solaris 10 zones

When a Solaris 10 host is discovered, Discovery runs commands to determine the zone name of the host and a software instance is created for all installed zones. The patterns search for a host with the zone name of global; this is the container host.

The list of installed zones in that host gives the list of zone names to search for on other Solaris 10 hosts. The patterns search for these hosts in the datastore and then link them to the SI for the zone Host node representing the container host. The installed zones are shown as VMs on the container host details page.

Note

You cannot run lsof inside a Solaris zone container, by design of the Solaris OS. All processes from all zones are visible in the global zone.

VMware consolidation

The host running the VMware instance is seen as an individual host. When the host is scanned, software instances representing the VMware instance and any running VMware guest OSs are created.

Software Instance nodes are linked to the Host node representing the physical server running the VMware instance and the Host node representing the virtual host.

Consolidation of cooperating hosts into clusters

A Cluster node represents a group of hosts collaborating to form a cluster. The Cluster node represents the group rather than a single physical entity. The types of clusters currently consolidated are:

Veritas clusters
Microsoft clusters

These are described in the following sections.

Veritas consolidation rule

The Veritas cluster consolidation pattern triggers on Software Instances of the type VERITAS Cluster Server. Where these have a cluster_id attribute defined, which is considered to be the unique cluster identifier, the pattern creates (updates) the Cluster node. It then links each Software Instance with the same cluster_id attribute.

Microsoft clusters consolidation rule

When a Windows host is discovered, the following registry keys are read as standard:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Cluster\ClusterInstanceID populates the cluster_instance_id attribute.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Cluster\ClusterName populates the cluster_name attribute.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Cluster\ClusterNameResource populates the cluster_name_resource attribute.

These attributes are part of the default taxonomy; they are created on a Host node when the WMI query returns results. If these queries return results then the host is assumed to be part of a Microsoft cluster.

The Microsoft cluster consolidation pattern triggers on Windows Host nodes with the cluster_instance_id attribute, which is considered to be the unique cluster identifier. Hosts with the same value set in this attribute are members of the same cluster. If this is set then the pattern creates (updates) the Cluster node and links to each host with the same cluster_instance_id attribute.