Device smart groups
After devices are imported, you can create smart groups to organize them.
A smart group is a group for which you define membership conditions based on object properties — in this case, device properties. Any device with properties matching the conditions you specify automatically becomes a member of the smart group.
You can use smart groups to organize devices according to specific criteria. For example, you might use smart groups to group devices by device type: all PXE provisioning devices, NIM devices, Jumpstart devices, and so on.
Another use for device smart groups is to group all PXE devices based on MAC address prefix. For example, the first three parts of the MAC address 00-0C-29-XX-XX-XX are commonly used for VMware ESX instances. To define a smart group that puts all VMware virtualized devices together in a single group, you would define a membership condition of any PXE device where MAC_ADDRESS starts with 00-0C-29.
In working with device smart groups, you can:
- Open a smart group in the smart group editor to view and edit its membership conditions. Right-click the smart group and select Open.
- Narrow the number of devices displayed in the hierarchical tree by filtering them using a string. Only devices that include the string, which can appear anywhere in the object name or description, are displayed in the results.