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5

Configuring Discovery and

Inventory Settings

With Dell™ Management Console you can discover and inventory devices, alert users, update drivers, BIOS, and firmware, and perform a variety of tasks for each system in your enterprise. Managed systems can include servers, printers, tape devices, storage devices, systems with remote access cards, Dell

PowerConnect™ switches, and digital keyboard/video/mouse (KVMs) switches used with rack-dense systems.

This section illustrates how a system administrator of a small-to-medium size business (50 servers, plus over 200 client systems, and 10 switches) can use the

Discovery and Inventory solutions of Dell Management Console.

The scenarios illustrates how an administrator in charge of managing network environments can configure Dell Management Console.

NOTE: These scenarios do not illustrate the full capabilities of Dell

Management Console.

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The Discovery User Interface

To access the Discovery portal: click Home  Discovery and Inventory 

Network Discovery .

Knowing Your Discovery User Interface

42

The Network Discovery Quick Start Actions Web part is a good place to start configuring discovery for network devices.

The Network Discovery Task Management Web part at the bottom of the screen displays the available discovery tasks and the tasks that have run.

The Discovery Results by Tasks Web part displays the tasks run and the number of devices discovered by the task.

The Discovered Device Classification Web part displays the various types of devices discovered. For example, servers, printers, tapes, switches, and so on.

Before Configuring Discovery Settings

Before using Dell Management Console to configure discovery, you must take some basic decisions based on the network. Specifically, you must determine the following:

• Host names, IP addresses, or IP subnet ranges of systems that you want to discover.

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• Credentials needed to communicate with the devices. For example, if you want to discover Microsoft

®

Windows

®

systems by using the WMI protocol, then you must provide Windows credentials

to Dell Management Console. See “Managing Credentials.”

• Systems management protocols needed to manage the systems and

devices on the network. Table 5-1 provides a quick reference.

To manage the protocols, create the connection profiles according to the systems management protocols supported by the devices. For more

information, see “Connection Profiles.”

Connection Profiles and Credentials Management

The Credential Manager enables you to encrypt and store sensitive data, namely the credentials, which are used to connect through the various protocols.

A connection profile is a set of protocols and their corresponding credentials that can be configured and saved as a logical set. This set is used by the discovery, inventory, and monitoring solutions as a reference to use the defined protocols.

Dell Management Console uses the connection profile to communicate with a device. Identify devices that require authentication and have a list of their credentials ready. Then create connection profiles for these devices. For example, if ten servers on the network have different authentication credentials, you must create a different connection profile for each of these systems.

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Managing Credentials

To add Dell|EMC storage devices to the network and discover these devices, provide the credentials for the discovery solution to communicate with the

Dell|EMC devices.

1 In Dell Management Console, click Settings  All Settings .

2 On the left hand pane, under the Settings  Monitoring and Alerting 

Credential Settings folder, select Credentials Management .

3 On the right hand pane, click Add Credentials .

4 On the Add Credentials dialog box, select EMC Credentials as the

Credential Type .

5 Provide the Name of this credential, for example, emc-cred.

Enter the Username and Password for the Dell|EMC device and click OK .

The new credential is displayed on the Credential Management page.

Connection Profiles

Dell Management Console provides a default connection profile. This profile has the following protocols enabled:

• HTTP

• ICMP

• SNMP V1 V2

• SNMP Trap Sender

• WMI

Refer to the default connection profile as a template and create a new connection profile with the protocols that you want to use to discover networked devices.

Viewing the Default Connection Profile

To view the default connection profile:

1 Click Setting  All Settings .

2 On the left pane, select the Settings folder  Monitoring and Alerting 

Protocol Management  Connection Profiles  Manage Connection

Profiles .

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Edit the default connection profile to add or remove protocols.

NOTE: Even though the default connection profile already exists, you must still configure the appropriate credentials for each protocol.

Editing the Default Connection Profile

You can edit the Default Connection Profile or add a new connection profile by clicking Add Settings :

1 On the Manage Connection Profile page, select Default Connection

Profile and click edit (the pencil icon.)

The Define Group Settings page displays the protocols that are pre-configured in the default profile.

2 On the Define Group Settings page, select On to enable IPMI.

3 Click the up arrow to add the IPMI credentials of the managed device or a group of devices.

NOTE: You must enter the KGkey of the managed device for IPMI to work correctly. Enter the KGkey in the IPMI Credential Profile of the device. For

more information, see “Managing Credentials.”

4 Disable other protocols like the HTTP, ICMP, and SNMP Trap Sender if the network devices do not use these protocols.

It is highly recommended to disable the protocols that are not required for network discovery, since higher number of protocols will decrease the speed at which devices are discovered.

5 Click OK .

Creating a New Connection Profile

If you add Dell|EMC devices to the network, you cannot use the default connection profile because this connection profile does not have the required systems management protocols enabled. You must create a new connection

profile with EMC and SNMP enabled. (see Table 5-1 for connection profiles

required for various devices.)

1

See “Viewing the Default Connection Profile.”

2 On the Manage Connection Profiles page, click Add Settings .

3 On the Define Group Settings pane, turn on the EMC protocol and click the down arrow to configure the EMC credentials.

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4 Enter the Connection Profile name, for example, EMC_SNMP .

5 Select emc-cred

from the drop down list, see “Managing Credentials.”

Dell Management Console retrieves the emc-cred information and populates all fields.

6 Select the SNMP V1 V2 protocol and turn it on and click the down arrow to configure the SNMP credentials and then click OK .

The new connection profile is displayed in the Manage Connection

Profiles page.

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Table 5-1. Protocols and Connection Profiles Required For Various Devices

Devices

Servers running supported

Microsoft Windows operating system

Servers running supported

Linux operating system

Dell PowerVault™ storage systems

Dell PowerConnect Switches

Tapes

Printers

Dell|EMC

Remote Access Controllers

Digital KVM

Servers running Lifecycle

Controller

Dell|EqualLogic

Systems Management

Protocol Supported

SNMP, WMI, and IPMI SNMP, WMI, or

IPMI, or a combination of these

SNMP and IPMI

MD Array

SNMP or IPMI, or a combination of these

MD Array

SNMP

SNMP

SNMP

SNMP and Navisphere ®

Secure CLI

SNMP

SNMP

Web Services for

Management (WS-

MAN)

SNMP

Protocols for

Connection Profile

SNMP

SNMP

SNMP

SNMP and EMC

SNMP

SNMP

WS-MAN

SNMP

Creating a Discovery Task

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Network Discovery .

2 In the Network Discovery Home page, in the Network Discovery

QuickStart Actions Web part, click Launch Discovery Wizard .

The Discover network devices page is displayed.

NOTE: On the Network Discovery Home page, on the Available Tasks tab, click New to create a discovery task.

3 In Step 1: Choose method of device discovery , select Targeted network scan and then click Next .

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NOTE: If you select ARP, provide the IP address of the router that is configured to accept SNMP requests.

4 In Step 2: Enter network IP Ranges , and click Include  Custom Range .

Custom ranges are used to define various subnets at the same time.

For example, a custom range of 10.94.*.* with a Subnet mask of

255.255.255.0 will scan all IP addresses from 10.94.1.1 to 10.94.255.254.

Use the custom range with caution as a large custom range can take a very long time to discover the devices.

5 In the Custom Range dialog box, enter the following information and then click Next :

Custom range: 10.94.168.*

Mask: 255.255.255.0

6 In Step 3: Select device communication protocol , select

Default Connection Profile . This profile has protocols such as, HTTP,

ICMP, SNMP, and WMI selected.

7 Edit Default Connection Profile to include the IPMI protocol, and click

Next .

See “Editing the Default Connection Profile.”

8 In Step 4: Enter task name , Enter Discover_All as the Task name and click Next .

9 In Step 5: Choose when to run the discovery , and then choose the schedule for the task.

Schedule discovery of devices on the network based on your requirements, for example, once a week.

To run schedule once a week, do the following:

Schedule : Shared Schedule

Select Shared Schedule : Weekly click New .

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10 In the Create New Shared Schedule page, enter name and description of the schedule.

Select Add schedule  Scheduled Time and select 0600 hours as the start time for the discovery task.

Click No repeat and select the Week and Monday in the Repeat Schedule screen.

Click OK .

11 On the Discover network devices page, click Finish .

The Discover_All task is displayed in the Task Management Portal under

Server Tasks  Network Tasks folder.

NOTE: All devices/groups of devices that have different authentication credentials will require a new connection profile. For each such device or group of devices, you must create a separate discovery task and map it to the appropriate connection profile.

Running the Discovery Task

After creating the discovery task, you can run the Discover_All task:

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Network Discovery .

The Network Discovery Home page is displayed.

2 On the Network Discovery Task Management Web part, select the

Available Tasks tab.

3 Select the Discover_All task and click Run Now...

.

You can run the discovery tasks migrated from Dell OpenManage™

IT Assistant.

For more information on migrating discovery tasks, see “Migrating Discovery

Information from IT Assistant 8.x.”

After discovering the network devices, create and run an inventory task to

view details of the devices. For more information, see “Creating an Inventory

Task to Inventory All Systems.”

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Viewing Discovered Devices

To view the discovered network devices:

1 Click Manage  All Devices .

2 On the left pane, select servers to view the systems that are discovered.

All servers that have Dell OpenManage Server Administrator installed on them are discovered as Resource Type = Dell Computer .

For information on other resource types, see Table 4-1.

3 Select a system and double-click it to view its details.

The Resource Manager page for this system is displayed.

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NOTE: If the health of the discovered device is normal, the Dell Agent Health

Status Web part takes some time to display the primary health metric. For

more information on health metric, see Table 9-8.

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Point to Note

• If you have to delete a virtual machine, modular system, or a cluster displayed in the All Devices tree, first delete the devices under the group and then delete the group. Remove the group from the discovery range too; other wise, the group is displayed after every discovery cycle.

Resource Manager

The Resource Manager page contains two Web parts on the right hand pane of the screen.

The Item Property Summary Web part contains general information about the discovered device.

The Dell Agent Health Status Web part displays all agents associated with a device. This Web part provides status on management agents, such as Server

Administrator, Storage Management, and Remote Access Controller. The

SNMP or WMI protocol is used to retrieve this information.

The agent health status is driven by events generated by the monitor solution.

for more information, see “Monitoring and Alerting.” After discovery, the

resource manager displays the status of the discovered agents. If the monitor solution initiates an alert originating from one or more monitored agents, the agent status changes to Critical, Warning, or Undetermined.

NOTE: Not all agents are available on all devices. For example, if Storage

Management Service Remote Access Controllers are not installed on a system, agent information about the components are not displayed. Absence of agents indicates that the appropriate software is either not installed or the hardware is not properly enabled.

Also, different device types display different agents.

The status of the agent is directly related to health type alerts received for the device being monitored. For example, if the Primary Health for a device is displayed as warning or critical, a corresponding health alert is displayed in the

Event Console Web part.

Event Console reduces the need to maintain separate tools to monitor systems, software, printers, and other devices. Event Console collects SNMP traps and other status messages and displays them in a single location.

All status messages are converted to a common format that links each received message to the affected resource in the Dell Management

Console database. These formatted messages are called alerts.

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In the Event Console, when traps get generated from FC switches, ethernet switches, or EMC arrays, the IP address of the device is displayed; however, the name of the device is not displayed even though the device is already discovered in Dell Management Console.

Event Console also provides a rule-based triggering system that lets you process alerts in the following ways:

• Launch task server tasks in response to specific alerts.

If launch discovery tasks are available for some devices:

• Prevent specific alerts from being stored in the alert database.

• Forward alerts to another management system.

For more information on Event Console, see the Symantec documentation from Help  Context .

On the left hand side of the Resource Manager screen, you can view basic information about the device along with the connection state of the device.

The connection state displays whether the device is online or not.

In the Right-click actions section, a set of actions that can be performed on the device are displayed. This action list is context-sensitive, and the actions displayed depend on the type of the device being examined

(a system, out-of-band device, printer, and so on.)

Discovery Logs

Discovery logs let you review the status of the discovery tasks. The logs provide useful data when you want to troubleshoot issues with discovery.

By default, Dell Management Console does not save log entries.

To enable discovery logs:

NOTE: If you are discovering a large number of devices, enabling Discovery Logs may affect the performance of the Dell Management Console.

1 Click Settings  All Settings .

2 On the left pane, select the Discovery and Inventory folder  Discovery

Log Settings .

3 On the right pane, click Change Settings .

4 Select Enable discovery logging , enter the path where you want to save the discovery logs and click Save Settings .

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5 Close the browser window and restart the Altiris™ object host service.

Discovery Performance

To manage performance of Dell Management Console for discovery tasks, you can set the number of threads required for each discovery tasks before creating the discovery tasks.

1 Click Settings  All Settings .

2 On the right hand pane, under Settings  Discovery and Inventory 

Network Discovery Settings .

3 On the right hand pane, change the Maximum number of threads per discovery task .

This value is applied to all discovery tasks that you create.

To change the default value after creating a discovery task:

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Network Discovery .

The Network Discovery Home page is displayed.

2 On the Network Discovery Task Management Web part, under Available Tasks tab, select each task for which you want to change the number of threads.

Click the edit button (the pencil icon.)

3 On the Edit Discovery Task pane, click Advanced .

4 Change the Maximum number of threads per discovery task and click OK .

Alert-initiated Discovery

The alert-initiated discovery enables discovery of devices not managed by Dell

Management Console, through alerts or traps.

Configure the trap destination of the unmanaged devices in the network, with the IP address of the Dell Management Console system. When these devices send traps asynchronously to Dell Management Console system, each trap initiates an individual discovery process, which discovers the node that sent the trap.

This feature is disabled by default.

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NOTE: Dell recommends that you use caution when enabling this feature.

A high number of alerts from an unmanaged device could cause Dell Management

Console to stop responding.

Troubleshooting Discovery

To troubleshoot Discovery issues, use any one or all of these tools:

• Dell Troubleshooting Tool

• Network Discovery Logs

• Altiris™ Log Viewer

• Other Troubleshooting Tools

The Dell Troubleshooting tool is available with the Dell Management

Console installables; and with this tool, you can find the cause for connectivity issues. For more information, see the readme; available at the following location: <DMC DVD>\Tools\Troubleshoot\Readme.txt

.

For troubleshooting the Discovery related issues, see the Dell Management

Console - Trouble shooting Guide at the following location: en.community.dell.com/groups .

Network Discovery Logs

See “Discovery Logs.”

Altiris Log Viewer

To view the Altiris Log Viewer:

1 On the system where you installed Dell Management Console, click the

Start button.

2 Select Programs  Altiris  Diagnostics  Altiris Log Viewer .

The Altiris Log Viewer is displayed.

Other Troubleshooting Tools

• IPMI Connectivity Tools

For example, ipmish.exe, ipmitool.exe

• SNMP MIB Browser

For example, MG-SOFT MIB Browser

• Network Protocol Analyzer

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For example, Wireshark

Creating a New Organizational View and

Organizational Group

1 Click Manage  Organizational Views and Groups .

2 On the left pane, right-click the New Organizational Views  New 

Organizational View .

3 Right-click on the New Organizational View and select New 

Organizational Group .

You can add devices to this group and assign an appropriate role to this group.

Configuring Inventory Settings

The Dell Management Console Inventory Solution enables you to gather inventory information from the devices on your network using different protocols.

NOTE: Dell systems on which the Server Administrator is installed can enable the inventory task to report back specific details about the system.

Dell Management Console also allows you import MIBs to format incoming

SNMP traps. However, you cannot import MIBs and map them to data classes to extend agentless inventory to new devices. This functionality requires a license for the Altiris Inventory Solution from Symantec.

NOTE: In the context of Dell Management Console, agent-based means the

Altiris™ agent is installed on the target systems; whereas on the target systems.

agentless means the Dell systems management agent—Dell OpenManage Server Administrator—is installed

To access the inventory portal: click Home  Discovery and Inventory 

Agentless Inventory .

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Knowing Your Inventory User Interface

The Agentless Inventory Quick Start Web part is a good place to start configuring and viewing the inventory information for network devices.

The Agentless Inventory Tasks Web part at the bottom of the screen displays the available inventory tasks and the tasks that have run.

Creating an Inventory Task to Inventory All Systems

To inventory the discovered systems and display the information in Resource

Manager.

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Agentless Inventory .

The Agentless Inventory Home page is displayed.

2 In the Agentless Inventory QuickStart Web part, click Run inventory wizard .

The Agentless Inventory Task Creation page is displayed.

3 In step 1: Choose devices to inventory , for example, to inventory only the

Dell PowerEdge™ systems on the network, select Choose devices and select Servers from the Choose a group package drop-down menu, and then click Next .

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4 In step 2: Inventory network task name , enter a unique name—Dell Server

Inventory Task—to help distinguish between various tasks of the same type, and then click Next .

5 In step 3: Schedule , select Now , to run the schedule after creating this task, and then click Finish .

You can decide to specify a later date and time to run this task and make this a recurring task.

The Agentless Inventory task is created and displayed on the Agentless

Inventory Home page under the Agentless Inventory Tasks section.

Importing MIBs

You can extend the inventory capability using Management Information Base

(MIB).

To perform an MIB import:

1 From Dell Management Console, select Settings  All Settings 

Monitoring and Alerting  SNMP MIB import Browser  MIB Browser .

2 From the top right pane, select Import MIB file  Browse and select the required .MIB file and select Apply .

3 The MIB file is available at this location, iso  org  dod  internet  private  enterprises.

Creating an Inventory Task to Inventory Selected Devices in a Custom

Organizational Group

After you have created multiple organizational groups, see “Creating a New

Organizational View and Organizational Group,” you can inventory the

Dell|EMC devices only.

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Agentless Inventory to display the Agentless Inventory Home page.

2 Under the Agentless Inventory QuickStart Web part, click Run inventory wizard .

The Agentless Inventory Task Creation page is displayed.

3 In step 1: Choose devices to inventory , for example, to inventory only the

Dell|EMC devices on the network, select Choose devices and select All

Devices from the Choose a group package drop down menu.

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4 Clear all devices except the Dell|EMC devices and then click Next .

5 In step 2: Inventory network task name , enter a unique name—Dell Server

Inventory Task—to help distinguish between various tasks of the same type and then click Next .

6 In step 3: Schedule , select Now to run the schedule after creating this task, and then click Finish . You can specify a later date and time to run this task, and make this a recurring task.

Viewing the Progress and Details of the Task

To view the progress of the inventory task:

1 Click Home  Discovery and Inventory  Agentless Inventory to display the Agentless Inventory Home page.

2 Under the Agentless Inventory Tasks Web part, select the Tasks Run tab.

The status and progress of the tasks are displayed.

3 Under the Agentless Inventory Tasks Web part, select the Available Tasks tab.

All available inventory tasks are displayed.

4 Double-click the task instance to view additional details of the task.

The details of the task are displayed in a new window.

Viewing Results of the Inventory Task

1 Click on Manage  All Devices .

2 On the left-hand pane, expand the All Devices tree and select Servers .

The discovered systems are displayed on the right-hand pane with

Resource Type as Dell Computer .

3 Double-click the system name for which you want to see the inventory details.

4 In the Resource Manager Home page, click Summaries 

Ha rdware Summary .

The inventory information of the system is displayed. To view Hardware

Summary, install Server Administrator on the target system and categorize the system as a Dell Computer.

Configuring Discovery and Inventory Settings