Quick Start: Deploying Switch Port Management

The following procedure gives an overview of the deployment process for Switch Port Management.

The switches and switch-routers have already been discovered by NetMRI. Switch Port Management polls switches for a detailed collection of information on switch port connectivity, the status of ports, and end devices. For information, see Running the Setup Wizard, Configuring Network Discovery Settings, and Running Network Discovery on Routed and Switched Networks.

NetMRI gives explicitly licensed devices priority in determining which devices to manage. Unlicensed devices continue to be managed by the appliance, but the appliance periodically collects only basic discovery data. See Other Network View Operations for more information.

After performing the initial setup and defining your Discovery settings, you must define your global switch port polling settings. Click the Settings icon > Setup > Collection and Groups > Global > Switchport Manager side tab to define your switch polling settings. Several primary polling options are offered:
- Periodic Polling: Define regular polling time periods. Choose a polling interval of 1 or more Minutes or Hours. This is the default polling behavior for NetMRI. The default polling interval is 60 minutes.
- Scheduled Polling: Schedule recurrent polling based on hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly time periods. Click Add New Schedule and select a Recurrence Pattern of Once, Hourly, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. In all cases, you must choose an Execution Time.
- On-demand polling: Click Poll Now to immediately begin polling all switch and switch-router devices in the managed network. For more information, see Understanding SPM Polling.
- Completely disable switch port polling.
After defining global polling settings, you can define more specific polling settings at the Device Group level. For more information, see Device Actions in Switch Port Management.
After some time, polled switch performance and configuration data appear in the NetMRI UI.
Go to Network Explorer > Switch Port Management.
The left-side menu provides three categories: Devices, Interfaces, and End Hosts.
Click any menu item on the left for more information about the switched devices in the network. For more information, see Using the Switch Port Management Console.
For port control, you can set any switched interface to administratively Up or administratively Down by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Set Admin Status. The NetMRI Sandbox with the built-in Port Activation Perl script is required for this operation. For more information, see Using the NetMRI Sandbox.
You can also assign or change a VLAN assignment for a switch port by right-clicking the switch interface link and selecting Edit VLAN Membership.

When you execute port control tasks such as Set Admin Status for an SPM port, NetMRI displays a separate window showing the execution state of the command. In some cases, completion may take some time. NetMRI automatically polls the device at regular intervals to check the status and notifies the user when the command completes.