Administrative Domains Concepts

Sun Management Center software can monitor a multitude of hosts. To enable you to perform your monitoring tasks in an efficient manner, Sun Management Center software organizes hosts into groups. The largest, highest-level grouping is an administrative domain. An administrative domain is an arbitrary grouping of hosts, subnets, networks, buildings, and so on.

You can create one or more administrative domains. Each administrative domain consists of one or more members that are arranged in a hierarchy. For example, you might decide that an administrative domain consists of all the hosts in one building. Or, you might decide that an administrative domain consists of all the hosts in a campus. Note the following characteristics that apply to domains.

• Each domain name must be unique.

• Domain names cannot be changed.

• Users who belong to the group esdomadm can create administrative domains, create groups within administrative domains, and perform similar tasks. For more information about security, see Chapter 18, Sun Management Center Security.

For example, you might set up three administrative domains, one for production, one for testing, and one for integration testing. Alternatively you might set up domains that are based on hardware platform, such as a domain for x86 machines and a domain for Sun Blade 1000s. If you set up a domain for each hardware platform, you might also set up a group within that domain for the machines of that hardware platform with a specific patch applied

Spend some time planning how you want to organize your hosts into different administrative domains.

Decide whether you need additional groups below the administrative domain to organize your hosts. For example, if there are several hundred hosts, placing your hosts individually in one administrative domain is impractical.

You might decide to break the administrative domain into a set of smaller groups, for example, campuses. The Headquarters administrative domain might consist of several campus locations. Each of these campus locations might be broken into smaller groups, for example, buildings. Similarly, each building might be broken into smaller groups, such as networks, subnets, and groups. Finally, each group contains individual hosts.

In this particular example, the hierarchical order, from highest level to lowest level, is as follows:

1. Administrative domain

2. Campus

3. Building

4. Network

5. Subnet

6. Group

7. Individual host

For detailed information about creating administrative domains, see To Create Administrative Domains.

The home domain is the administrative domain that is displayed when you log into a specific server.