Infoblox vDiscovery Task
- Shirly Tsang
Analytics
Infoblox vDiscovery can work with or without the Cloud Network Automation (CNA) license. CNA provides enhanced visibility for your cloud resources, greatly extending your searching, reporting and monitoring capabilities. When deployed without CNA, vDiscovery will help you keep your IPAM data up to date.
Create a vDiscovery Task
Login to the Infoblox Grid Manager GUI.
Switch to the Cloud or Data Management → IPAM tab.
Expand the vDiscovery menu and select Discovery Manager.
Click on the + (Add) button.
Enter a descriptive name.
Click Select to assign a Grid member to the vDiscovery task.
Click Next.
In the Server Type menu, select GCP.
Click on the Upload button.
Note: The file name for the service account file must be unique.
Click Select and choose your service account key file.
Click Upload.
Click Next.
Review the configuration available for Network Views.
Note: The most common cause for vDiscovery to fail to import any data is a “Sync Error” due to overlapping/conflicting address space. To account for any address space conflicts that are encountered during the vDiscovery process or with your existing IPAM data, you may need to select the option to use “The tenant's network view (if it does not exist, create a new one)”.
Optional: NIOS 8.6.3 and later add the ability to limit which virtual networks are discovered using Include or Exclude filters. To filter which networks are discovered:
Select Enable Filter.
Use the Network dropdown to select INCLUDE or EXCLUDE. If you select include, only networks that you list in the filter are discovered. If you select exclude, all networks except those listed in the filter are discovered.
Click the +.
Enter a network in CIDR format, for example 172.16.0.0/16.
Click the + again to add additional CIDRs.
Click Next.
Review the options for handling discovered data. For detailed information on each of the options, refer to NIOS Documentation.
For automatic creation of DNS records, enable the option “For every newly discovered IP address, create:”.
Select the desired DNS record object type. If in doubt, stick with the default (Host) option. For zones integrated with the Microsoft Management feature, use the A & PTR Record option.
The name for DNS records that are created is controlled with a macro, with the most commonly used macro being ${vm_name). In the text box, type the desired macro, followed by the zone that you want to use. Example: ${vm_name}.mycompany.com.
The zone must be created separately from the vDiscovery task, though this can be done after the vDiscovery has already been created. If vDiscovery runs before the zone is created, any discovered objects will be marked as ‘unmanaged’ until the zone is created, and it runs again.
If a different format is desired for the DNS record name, a full list of available macros can be found in the Help panel. To view this, click on the question mark at the top-right hand corner of the window and scroll down to the section titled “The DNS name will be computed from the formula”.
Click Next.
Optional: Configure a schedule to automatically run the vDiscovery task.
Note: The scheduler enables you to run the vDiscovery task as frequently as once an hour. If this must be run more frequently, this can be accomplished using the API. Refer to the Infoblox REST API guide for examples and guidelines on this process.
Click Save & Close.
Run the vDiscovery Task
To manually start the vDiscovery task:
In the vDiscovery Job Manager, click on the gear wheel and select Start.
Click Yes to start the vDiscovery job.
Click the Refresh button at the bottom of the window until the Status shows Job completed.
Note: The status may show the vDiscovery task completed but with warnings. This can happen if objects are skipped, including if the name for a VM is in an invalid format (vDiscovery does not support dotted VM names), for any instances that have been terminated, or if the zone configured in the vDiscovery task cannot be found.
Click Close.
