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- If necessary, install your NetMRI appliance or appliances. For more information, see the Infoblox Installation Guide for your NetMRI appliances. Ensure that you have the full feature licensing and device licensing entitlements for your deployment. For more information, see Understanding Platform Limits, Licensing Limits, and Effective Limits. If you are upgrading your NetMRI installation, check the installation instructions in the Release Notes for your software (and see the section below, Discovery with an Existing NetMRI Platform.
Also, read the section Preparing for NetMRI VRF Access for information on checking and configuring VRF-aware devices to which NetMRI will connect for managing virtual networks. - Configure your first network views for network management.
For new installations, NetMRI automatically provides an initial network view, named Network 1, as part of the initial setup. For the initial discovery of the network, you may only need this first network view. For more information, see Configuring Network Views. - You combine network views with scan interfaces to separate and manage networks. For new installations, the Network 1 network view is automatically bound to your appliance's LAN1 port. This may be the only interface you need for initial network discovery. This interface connects to the router through which NetMRI begins to discover the network. For more information, see Configuring Scan Interfaces.
- Configure your discovery settings. They include discovery IP address ranges, possible static IP addresses of devices you explicitly want to discover in your networks, a seed router for network discovery and possible device hints to improve odds of finding devices. The seed router might be, for example, the router to which NetMRI first connects for discovery of the network. For more information, see the sections Configuring Discovery Ranges, Specifying Static IPs, Adding Seed Routers, Configuring CISCO APIC, and Adding Device Hints.
- Add the necessary device SNMP credentials, and CLI admin login and Enable password credentials. For more information, see Adding and Editing Device Credentials and its various sections. You can also add and test credentials for individual devices; for more information, see Adding and Testing SNMP Credentials for a Device.
- Associate discovery settings to network views. Add your discovery settings from Step 4 to the network views and begin to discover the network. Initial discovery of your networks begins automatically after the discovery ranges and other discovery settings, such as a seed router, are added to the network view, which also must have a scan interface connection. For more information, see Discovery Using Network Views.
- Watch data collection. Network data collection and virtual network detection take place during your initial network discovery, which begins automatically when the network connection is established from NetMRI, to the network to be discovered. Perform the following to view discovered information about your network:
- View summaries of discovery events: Click the All Devices device group in the right panel, and open the Network Explorer –> Discovery page to see a table of all devices being discovered by NetMRI. For more information about the features on this page, see Viewing and managing Discovery Results.
- View a list of devices your appliance has recently discovered: Click the All Devices device group in the right panel, and open the Network Explorer –> Inventory page to see tables of all member devices. For more information about the features on this page, see Viewing Network Inventory.
- View summaries of recently discovered network phenomena: Includes summary information of routed networks, VLANs, route targets, and virtual networks (VRFs). For more information about the features on this page, see Summarizing Network Topologies.
- Map virtual networks. If your network has virtual networks, NetMRI automatically discovers them on the devices where they are configured, and alerts you through System Health banner messages at the top of the screen to map those VRF-aware devices to the network views where they belong. By mapping each virtual network to network views, you provide more information to the discovery process. For more information, see Mapping Virtual Networks to Network Views.
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- Go to Settings icon –> Setup –> Scan Interfaces. The Scan Interfaces Settings page appears, listing all device interfaces that may be used by the appliance. Depending on the hardware and system type, you will see one or more interfaces named MGMT and/or LANn (where n is the physical port number). If your system is an Operations Center, the Collector Name is shown alongside the interfaces. If any virtual scan interfaces are defined, they will have names like LAN2.111. See Configuring Virtual Scan Interfaces below for more information.
- Hover over the Action icon for any of the physical ports and select Edit from the menu.
- Choose from the Network View configuration section:
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- Click Settings icon -> General Settings -> Advanced Settings.
- In the settings list, navigate to the Deduplication settings group.
- Click the gear icon for each setting in the group and select Edit. You can edit the following settings:
- Enable the load balancer: Enables the load balancing feature for moving devices from highly-loaded collectors to less loaded collectors. The load balancer runs on the weekly maintenance schedule.
- Minimum capacity utilization: Sets the minimum percentage of devices, from collector's total capacity in terms of managed devices, at which moving devices from such collectors is allowed. For example, if a collector that can manage 1000 devices currently manages less than 40% percent of devices, NetMRI will not move devices from that collector to other collectors as its load is regarded as low.
- Minimum capacity utilization difference: Sets the minimum difference, in percentage, the current device's utilization by collectors, and at which devices can be moved to the less loaded collector. For example, if a collector has a 47% load in terms of devices and another one has a 45% load, it does not make sense to move devices from the first one to the second.
- Timeout for choosing the collector: Sets the maximum allowable time, in hours, for choosing the best management collector for the device.
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When you click the check box in the Select column of the table header, in a table that contains multiple pages, only the rows on the current page are selected. All selected rows are greyed out on the table page, denoting their selection. After you select all rows on a page, you can deselect a specific row by clearing the check box for the row; . Then, the remaining table rows remain selected.
For Discovery tasks, you can do perform the following:
- Click Discover Next to execute Discovery protocols on the selected devices. A prompt appears: Are you sure you want to discover the selected 23 device(s) next?
- Click License to change the license status of all selected devices. For more information, see NetMRI Licensing.
- Click Unmanage to remove the selected devices from management by NetMRI. A prompt appears: Are you sure you want to stop managing the selected xx devices? The chosen devices will be removed from their licensing and NetMRI will add the license allocation to its availability pool.
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To view discovery status for any device, open the Device Viewer by navigating to Network Explorer –> -> Discovery and clicking a device link, or Device Viewer –> -> Settings & Status –> Management Status. You will see the Management Status for the device. This is an important block of information that immediately describes the effectiveness of communications to the device by NetMRI.
This page provides a subset of the same information listed on the Discovery page, showing the E (Exists), P (Port Scanned), R (Reached), S (SNMP), SC (SNMP Collection), C (Config Credential), CC (Config Collection), and G (Groups) data results for a single device, each with their respective explanation.
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If the system admin changes the Name or Type of device in the Device Viewer's General Settings page (Device Viewer –> Settings & Status –> General Settings), re-discovery of that device's settings will no longer be active. For more information, see Viewing and Changing General Settings for a Device.
To revert to the auto-discovery of changes to that device's identifying information in the network, you can delete the device from the Discovered Devices list in the Network Explorer –> Discovery tab. The device is removed from the table. You will need to wait for NetMRI to re-discover the device on the network, and then refresh or re-open the Network Explorer –> Discovery tab to view the updated information. Click the device group name in the right panel if you need to locate the updated device in its expected group.
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