That dreaded discovery task

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

I have our SIM installation set up to both run automatic discovery once a week (I believe that's default), and also to discover any machine that sends in a trap (which is somewhere under the options menu).

For the majority of our servers this works excellent, the servers exist in SIM and should they for some reason not exist, have been deleted etc, they will be rediscovered as soon as they send a trap (for example at reboot). Good for keeping all servers in SIM, but not so good on our "high-availability" solutions, namely clusters and load balancers.

We use 3 kinds of HA-solutions, MSCS, Veritas Cluster Server and NLB, and a similar problem happens to all of these.

We are not exactly sure whan it happens or what triggers it, if it's the discovery, a cluster failover or both. But the scenario goes like this

1. Starting without any of the servers in SIM, we can perform a discovery of them, this will add the servernames to SIM. In the case of MSCS the clusternames will also be discovered. So we end up with
Server1, IP-1, belongs to ClusterA, IP-A
Server2, IP-2, belongs to ClusterA, IP-A
Server3, IP-3, belongs to ClusterB, IP-B
Server4, IP-4, belongs to ClusterB, IP-B
(IP=IP-address, dedicated + clustered)

This is just fine and how we'd want it to look. However, after a few days instead what we may see could look like this:
Server1, IP-1&IP-2, belongs to ClusterA, IP-A
(Server2 not listed)
Server3 is now ClusterB, IP-B
Server4, IP-4, belongs to ClusterB, IP-B

Some small variations on this exist depending on whether we are talking about NLB, MSCS or Veritas, the last being the worst since it may even list the servername as any IP adress in the cluster, but not necessarily the same IP adress as the one given in the servername.

I have tried setting IP restrictions on the HP agents on all servers, I have tried editing the details in SIM and enabling the switch that says SIM should not be allowed to change this name during discovery, and I have tried excluding the IP adresses of the clusters and I have also tried both with and without cluster agents enabled on the monitored servers, so far with little success as SIM completely ignores me and continues to change the servernames seemingly at random.

All I want is for SIM to list actual physical server names, IP adresses should preferrably be correct but does not need to show all adresses just one working is fine by me, and whether the server is member of a cluster or not I could not care less for at the moment.

Is there any more settings I could try and check to keep the servers named correctly so all reportings doesn't go completely bananas ?

[G Edwards]

I haven't dealt with clusters so I don't know if this is your issue, but this is from the read me:

CLUSTER ISSUES

Cluster identification employs many different agents, including WBEM
and SNMP, to determine if a system is a cluster or a cluster node.
Starting with the SmartStart 6.30 CD, one of the clustering SNMP
agents has not been fully installed even though SmartStart states
that all clustering agents are installed. If there are any cluster
identification issues, the following key must be added to the registry
on each cluster node:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,"SOFTWARE\Compaq\CompaqCommonClusterAgent\
CurrentVersion", Value: Pathname,%REG_EXPAND_SZ%,
"%SystemRoot%\System32\svrclu.dll"

Restart the SNMP service on each cluster node.

This problem should be corrected on the SmartStart 7.4 CD.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Thanks, although I've also received this notice via HP alerts, and since I'm using 7.51 agents I partly thought it should be fixed, but in general I had hoped it would not be relevant since from my understanding of the description it deals with issues where SIM does not properly detect the clusters rather than the case here where SIM actually does detect the clusters but instead changes the names of the physical machines behind the clusters every now and then.
Still I'm looking into testing this setting on some of the clusters just to see whether it will give me anything and if it possibly still is an issue in the 7.51 agents/drivers.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Maybe I should also add that NLB (load balancing) is from the server point of view mainly an extra IP adress and a few settings, so the problem is rather SIM not properly handling servers with multiple DNS names when these are assigned to separate IP adresses on the same server.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Is this possibly related to or the same as this one ?

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1040805

[BJÖRN LUNDQUIST_1]

Hi !
Did you get to a solution for this problem, if you did, please share it. Im abaot to bang my head against the wall :(

/BJörn

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Nope, nothing from HP yet, after about 1,5 years since I opened the case first time :)

Nice to hear others have this issue too, maybe not for you, but at least for me since it confirms for me that this is a SIM issue and not something in our specific setup.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Well, it did not help to set the clusternodes to use Trust by Cert instead of Trust by Name.

All I got out of that are 20 servers with trust errors (I only tested on 20 machines instead of all ;))

[fishmn]

Not to worry I too see this on our clusters. It is a crap shoot as to wich cluster node will show up in SIM. Clearly cluster ID is an issue that SIM developers need to work on.. although I know they have bigger fish to fry right now.. like fixing WBEM.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

WBEM, never used it, I use SNMP instead. Oh wait, could that be because WBEM works so poorly... ;)

Anyway, since SNMP works I am of the opinion it would be more of a priority to be able to trust that your servers are actually being monitored than fixing an additional protocol that is not really needed since SNMP could be used.
I'm seeing this as a major liability issue that you can't trust that a server you added yesterday cannot be found today but resources/id now is assigned to a completely different physical node, i.e. another machine.

[Jason Rackle]

We have had issues with SIM and NLB for years. It is not a PSP issue as this problem has existed and continues to exist across minor and major PSP releases. It is not a hardware issue as this problem exists across our P-class and C-class chassis. For us, everytime a server is "identified" HP SIM no longer knows where the server physically resides. If we "identify" the servers iLO all is well again...until the server is "identified".