Active Directory or E-Directory

[Frank Vassios]

We have a very large enterprise that has Novell & Microsoft. We have both E-Directory & Active Directory and they are not connected with XML connectors at this time. My question is regarding the centralized systems management of these evironments. Is integrating IM7 better with one or the other? We are not sure which way to go. Thanks in advance for suggestions.

[David Claypool]

IM7 (and for that matter hpSIM) does not use LDAP directly. On the machine that the application is hosted, you identify a valid user account for that machine. That can be a local account or a domain account (which includes accounts that are hosted in ActiveDirectory).

Agents that are run on managed systems have a built-in security model based on user accounts maintained by the agent itself, with 3 built-in accounts: administrator, operator and user. Each of these can have a separate password and allow/deny access on a read/write/none granularity. In addition, the Windows agent can have a trust relationship set up with IM7 or hpSIM to provide a single-sign-on functionality.

The Lights-Out products (iLO with Advanced Pack or RILOE II) have an option to allow the elimination of on-board user accounts and instead to use LDAP. The functionality is the same whether used with AD or eD.

[Jadrice Toussaint]

Frank -

If you have AD in your environment, go with AD instead of ED

[Frank Vassios]

I agree and want to go with AD over ED. The issue I am having is that I need the specifics as to why that is better. It is a sales job I need to perform and I am having difficulty with obtaining the specifics as to why AD is better or more robust than ED.

[Jadrice Toussaint]

Simple, IM7 was design to run in a windows environement. At the present time, it will only work with Active directory and not ED (see the documentation). IM7 looks to pull user information from AD when adding a user.

[Frank Vassios]

Which documenation are you talking about? I have the option when installing to choose either AD or ED.

[Jadrice Toussaint]

You must be talk about the rib-boards. IM or SIM has no such option.