Working With Device Support Bundles

A Device Support Bundle (DSB) is a small collection of files designed specifically to enable installed to discover, communicate with, and manage new types and models of network devices that may not be included in the substantial universe of device support already offered by NetMRI. Features in the appliance enable editing, validation, and testing against managed devices for Device Support Bundles that you create. (Make sure to refer to the Infoblox Device Support Guide document under Additional Documentation for more information on DSB creation.)

Note

The text-based DSB file containing the XML code for the bundle must be in native XML format. Use a text editor that directly supports saving in the .XML file format. A plain-text file. with the file extension .TXT, which contains XML code will not be visible to the import feature.

To begin working with installed's Device Support Bundles feature set, go to the Settings icon > Setup > Device Support Bundles.

Note

Support bundle operations require the SysAdmin role.

The Device Support Bundles page appears, displaying a table of information for any existing device support bundles. The columns in this table indicate that a given DSB explicitly supports the given data elements (not all fields will necessarily be defined):

Actions	Displays the Actions menu for the selected row in the DSB table.
Name	Name of the device vendor.
Version	Arbitrary version number for the bundle file.
Author	Author of the DSB file.
Status	Indicates the state of the DSB in the appliance. In most cases, the value should read Installed. If you've created a new DSB in the DSB editor but have not yet installed it into the appliance (perhaps because you are in the process of editing it), this value will read New. If you have an installed DSB in the table, but you are in the process of modifying it, its status changes to Modified. Once this is done, you will need to re-install the DSB, or optionally discard the changes; in this case, the status appears as Revert.
Valid Ind	Will read Yes or No depending on whether a validation test has been run against the DSB.
Unit Tests	Indicates whether any unit tests are part of the current DSB.
Neighbor Ind	Neighbor Object ID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
Inventory Ind	Inventory Object ID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
Environmental Ind	Environmental Object ID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
CPU Ind	CPU ObjectID information for the DSB type.
Memory Ind	SNMP System memory ObjectID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
VLAN Ind	SNMP VLAN ObjectID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
Forwarding Ind	SNMP forwarding ObjectID information, where applicable, for the DSB type.
Port Ind	The communications port through which the device type in the bundle is reachable.
Config Ind	Config information, where applicable, for the device support bundle.

No individual device support XML file is likely to have every definition or have ObjectIDs (Oids) to represent them in the MIBs. When you load a DSB into the appliance, you may see a series of information messages indicating that some definitions are not present in the XML file. This does not indicate an error.

To create a new Device Support Bundle, do the following:

Go to the Settings icon > Setup > Device Support Bundle.
To create a new device support bundle, click New at the top of the table.
A prompt appears, requesting the entry of a name for the new bundle.
Enter the name and click OK or press Enter.
The DSB Editor window appears. A new DSB is created out of a set of built-in templates. The DSB bundle XML file, in which you write your support file for the bundle, contains a series of XML tags that are documented in each of the development steps. Typically, a device support bundle also will include vendor MIB files, and CCS or Perl scripts to handle configuration file collection. Vendor MIB files may also be imported separately.
See the supplementary document Infoblox Device Support Guide in Additional Documentation in the online Help for much more detail on XML DSB tags and writing DSB files, and Job Scripting for much more detail on Perl and CCS scripting.

To import a previously created Device Support Bundle, do the following:

Go to the Settings icon > Setup > Device Support Bundle.
Click Import to open the Import file requester.
Click Browse and navigate to the location where you have saved the Zip file with the XML file and the directory containing the needed MIB files.
Select the Zip file and click Import.
An Import Status dialog box showing the import file output appears. The import may take several minutes to complete and will display the results of each import function. Click Close when the process completes.