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, and provide a unique name for each domain. 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.

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 on 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.