missing vm hosts for standalone systems

December 3, 2018 at 8:00 AM

We have virtual machines running on standalone physical servers. The physical servers are uniquely identified by their FQDN, their serial number and their IP. Their host names are not unique, but as I mentioned the FQDNs are. I'm being told that the only value the SIM is looking for to uniquely identify these serves is the host name. As a result, these servers are overwriting each other and will never be reported correctly in the Snow License Manager. I'm wondering if anyone else has this issue. Why wouldn't a server value that is always unique be the value the SIM is looking for?

Portal User
8 years ago
Hi Suzanne, Marcel is generally correct, but data from SIM works a bit different. If the issue you are having is because the SIM confuses the two hosts when aggregating your datacenter you will have these issues with hostname versus FQDN. When we get data from SIM, we use host name as the identifier as we usually do not have access to data like bios serial and CID to build a unique GUID like we do with snow agent scan data. The reason FQDN is not used as identifier in these cases is that depending on the data source, FQDN is not always available for the SIM or the inventory agent to collect. That creates issues when merging data from a source that supports FQDN reporting with data from a source that does not. For example, if we get information from both a SCCM connector from SIM, and an inventory agent installed on the same computer, we want to merge the two results in SLM. That will be difficult if we get FQDN from agent but not from SCCM. Unfortunately we are sometimes limitied to a common denominator that is not always that unique. You MIGHT be able to work around this by setting different site names on these different SIM connectors, so that the combination of computer name and site name is unique. But I am not 100% sure that this will solve the issue.
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- AxelLa
  8 years ago
  Hello, just out of curiousity I have modified the SITE name of my standalone ESXi Host and it appears twice now in Snow Inventory, so I assume it will be a duplicate in SLM as well after the next Data Update Job. So it should be worth trying to define one connector per standalone server, even if this means some effort. Regards, Axel
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Community Manager (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Hu Suzanne, your assumption, 'the only thing we are looking at is the host name' only applies if you are using a functionality in Snow Inventory Server called 'Hostname Only Mode'. Once activated, your statement would be true. By default, there are various identifiers including host name , bios serial number , site name and config name . If one value changes, machines would be matched to a single entry in Snow License Manager. If two values vary, a new object would be created (even if the host name would match). It would definitely be possible to scan and inventory machines with the same host name. If you have further questions, please let us know. /marcel
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