How does CIM determine which IP to use for a device

[Moe_5]

In our environment, managed servers have multiple IPs bound to one NIC. This allows clients to setup multiple IIS sites on the various IP addresses. CIM7 appears to grab one of the IP addresses, and it seems to be the first IP address that shows up when doing an IP config command. Well the problem is that this IP is NOT the primary and therefore does not map to a wins/dns. So we have multiple machines listed with random Ip's chosen which usually are not the primary. As you can see this makes the management portion very hard because of the fact that we cannot serch for a server netbios when its listed as an IP.How does CIM exactly determine the IP it chooses and can this be changed?

[Ayman Altounji]

is this during an automatic discovery? Are you specifying a subnet range to disconver these devices? It should pick out every ip in the range. From there, you can edit the entry by manual, edit, the pop in the IP, hit "get device parameters" then put in the server name, then hit the update button.

[Ayman Altounji]

When Insight Manager 7 discovers a device, it stores the IP addresses in the dB. The very first IP address retrieved for a device becomes its "main IP". Most of the links on the Device Page utilize this address.

Keep in mind, in Insight Manager 7, you can now change the links to use EITHER name or IP Address (set under SETTINGS/SECURITY). If you use name, then multiple links based on IP won't be presented. Just a FYI......

[Ayman Altounji]

Have you tried using a host list to discover your servers? This would get you around the ip problem. sometimes this is the only way when using multiple ip addresses on a server. :)

[Ayman Altounji]

Excellent suggestion, Big Jim2! That would do it too.

[Moe_5]

Thanks for the responses guys but heres the breakdown my whole goal is to get away from creating these manual hosts files.Also we have 4000 servers were monitoring and going in to manually edit each and everyone is really not an option at this point.
CIM is grabbing the top most IP in the IPCONFIG i do on the mentioned servers and that is always an ip of a Virtual host thats bound to that server. Therefore the server is listed as a virtual IP in CIM and when it comes to managing these servers it becoms a pain to find their Netbios name.
Is there anyway to modify this setting and tell CIM which IP to actually use?

[Moe_5]

oh and by the way discovery is donr thru SNMP (no ip ranges)