Physical Hosts

A physical host represents a server in your network that has been registered with the provisioning system.

Physical Host Characteristics

• Each host must have a unique IP address.

• Each host must have a unique host name.

  When a server name is used to identify a new host, the server name is resolved to an IP address when the host is saved.

• When a Remote Agent and a Local Distributor are installed on the same host, they must have different, dedicated ports.

• Host locking prevents different users from simultaneously attempting to update the same host.

Before the provisioning system can work with a server, you must perform the following steps.

1. Install Remote Agent or Local Distributor software on the server.

2. Register the server as a physical host by creating a host record for the server.

3. Prepare the physical host.

The provisioning system prepares a host by installing plug-in specific software on the host's Remote Agent in the form of system service components. A host is considered prepared if all system service components that are applicable to the host have been installed on it. After a host has been prepared, you can perform operations on it, such as running comparisons and deploying applications.

Because each physical host represents a specific server, do not attempt to migrate a physical host record to another server. For example, if you need to replace a server that was registered as a Local Distributor, replace the server and create a new Local Distributor. If you attempt to migrate the old Local Distributor record to the new server, the Master Server might contain records indicating that the new server contains files that haven't been installed.