How to configure FNMS to treat same host name to support DR setup and vCenter

[craig_moore]

We have a similar issue with same host name but the issue we having how our vCenter introspections impact which host is tied to the VM which impacts licensing such as Red Hat.

So for example the production Redhat VM server is deployed in California and vCenter correctly linked that server to host in California.   Our red hat license correctly reported consumption based on that host in California.

In the DR site in Miami the DR Red Hat server with same name is powered off but shows in the vCenter instance in Miami.  So the problem now is that when we first ran the Miami vCenter instance introspection this past weekend the host for the red hat server California VM was moved to a host in Miami reporting as powered down.  This then updated the consumption on the Red Hat license as we now show that we have to license the host in Miami even though powered off and does not correctly report the production VM located in California linked to the host there.

Any ideas on how we would configure FNMS Cloud to address this issue?

[mfranz]

Hi Craig,

Has anything in your environment been cloned, are there identical UIDs/serial numbers?

Best regards,

Markward

[cmoore1972]

The server with the same name in DR site will have unique UUID but note that the FNMS agent is not installed on this server, only the production server located in California.

When vCenter job connects a VM guest to host does it use UUID or server name to match?

Thanks

Craig

[mfranz]

I would argue that the vCenter job does no match at all. It creates a NDI file per host and all VM's related to this host. This info, including the relation, is provided by the API. Here is an example of one of the VM entries:

The UID is basically the serial number. The VM itself will report it with "VMware-" in the front, but FNMS does normalize it for matching. The match is then made between an imported VM from FNMS (vCenter import) and an actual inventory (e.g. from the FNMS agent or SCCM) as part of the writer.

[ChrisG]

(Edit: I posted the below before seeing the comments from @craig_moore and @mfranz. Those comments are asking the right sort of things better than I've asked, but I'll leave my comments here for reference.)

Dealing with multiple devices that have the same name can be difficult. It may be that the relationship between hosts and VMs in this scenario is based on the VM name (e.g. because the information from vCenter doesn't provide sufficient alternate identity information to use something else), in which case it will likely to be difficult to automatically handle this.

I'm not sure if the VM serial numbers are relevant for this relationship, but one thing to check to rule it out as being a factor is that the different VMs do in fact have different serial numbers.