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Serial number being taken as the name of inventory device

Hello,

Some of inventories (IBM) show their serial number in the Name column, and in the serial column there is a value that I'm not sure what it is.
How can I fix it? 

Thank you.

 

(1) Solution
ChrisG
By Community Manager Community Manager
Community Manager

I think what you're seeing here is that the inventory device record with the name "780E560" is representing the physical chassis on which a number of LPARs are running. The chassis itself doesn't run an operating system with a hostname name that gets inventoried; the serial number prefix used by the BIOSes of the LPARs running on that chassis gets used as the name. The "80000...." value you're seeing is the serial number of the physical chassis, and is not directly related to the serial number used by the the LPARs.

(Did my reply solve the question? Click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION" to help others find answers faster. Liked something? Click "KUDO". Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera.)

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(4) Replies
ChrisG
By Community Manager Community Manager
Community Manager

I think what you're seeing here is that the inventory device record with the name "780E560" is representing the physical chassis on which a number of LPARs are running. The chassis itself doesn't run an operating system with a hostname name that gets inventoried; the serial number prefix used by the BIOSes of the LPARs running on that chassis gets used as the name. The "80000...." value you're seeing is the serial number of the physical chassis, and is not directly related to the serial number used by the the LPARs.

(Did my reply solve the question? Click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION" to help others find answers faster. Liked something? Click "KUDO". Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera.)

Interesting, could you check the "Inventory Device Type" and compare server's "Firmware Number vs. Serial # vs. Chassis" and in order to see what is happing you can check the VMs linked with physical host.

By the way I noticed the same issue with Oracle Sparc servers!

@aaaaaa / @FarrukhNaz  - As described by Chris, the data that you are seeing is by design to visually represent UNIX Hardware Partitioning (AIX LPARS, Solaris LDOM/Zones).

When the agent is run against a partition, it create an Inventory Device as a "Virtual Machine", along with any Physical/Shared Pools.  

In order to represent all of the individual partitions belonging to the same Chassis/Box, FNMS/ITAM creates a "Placeholder" inventory device as a VM Host.  The Device Name of this placeholder VM Host is taken from the Serial Number of the physical chassis.

Go to the Virtual Devices and Clusters view and find one of these placeholder UNIX Hosts.  If you expand that, then you will see all of the pools and partitions that are running on that physical chassis.

The value used to be referred to as a "fabricated serial number" on the VM Host.  Everyone has pointed you to the correct location to confirm the underlying hardware serial of the asset.

My only complaint has been that the Flexera UI did not make the Firmware or Chassis serial values viewable within the UI, even to the point of not being able to create custom reports from data cubes containing that value.  I believe I submitted an enhancement request or an "Idea" at one point to request that capability.  I don't recall whether or not Flexera accepted the recommendation.

David Mathias

NTT DATA Services