Discovering and Identifying Duplicate Servers

For managed servers that were discovered manually or by OS-based discovery, the N1 System Manager could discover the same server more than once. This duplication can happen in the following conditions:

• You discover a server manually. You then use SP-based discovery to discover another server but one of the platform MAC addresses of the second server matches a MAC address in the manual discovery file. A duplicate server has been discovered.

• You discover a server using OS-based discovery but its service processor is on a different subnet from its OS. You then use SP-based discovery to discover another server, but due to the conflict with subnets, the SP-based discovery command discovers the same server. A duplicate server has been discovered.

• Both of the above cases happen. Two duplicate servers have been discovered, and the same server appears three times.

Discovery of duplicate servers can lead to confusion and is not recommended. In addition, there is a risk that multiple attempts to provision an OS on the same managed server might occur simultaneously, or simultaneous attempts might be made to provision an OS on a server and power off the server.

If you use OS-based discovery or manual discovery to discover servers, use the detectduplicates utility to identify duplicate servers:

N1-ok> /opt/sun/n1gc/bin/detectduplicates
Name           Hardware       Discovered At  Network
manual1        V20z           -              File
manual2        V20z           -              File
192.168.79.2   V20z           192.168.79.2   Management
 
192.168.79.67  SF-T2000       192.168.79.67  Management
 manual3        T2000          -             File

In the output of the detectduplicates utility, duplicates are organized into groups, separated by a blank line. In this example, the detectduplicates utility has detected two groups of duplicates.

The output of the detectduplicates utility displays the following information:

• Name – The name of the server, as reported by the show server command.

• Hardware – The model of the server as reported by the show server command.

• Discovered At – The IP address that was used to discover the server. The IP address is reported as '-' for manually discovered servers.

• Network – The network that was used to discover the server. Possible values are:

  • Management – The management (service processor) network

  • Data – The provisioning network

  • File – Manually asserted