APTARE IT Analytics System Administrator Guide

Identifying hosts by WWN to avoid duplicates

By default, APTARE IT Analytics data collection finds hosts based on IP address or host name. Often hosts are collected from multiple sources and these sources have different names for the same host. In such environments, host name or IP address are not sufficient for uniquely identifying a host. In order to prevent duplicate hosts from being created in the database, APTARE IT Analytics can use the host's port WWN to uniquely identify a host.

A typical scenario that warrants WWN matching for unique host identification is described in the following example. Host data can be collected in multiple ways; for example, via a manual CSV load, as well as from Virtualization Manager and from Capacity Manager HP 3PAR collection. In this example, all three sources provide different names for the host, which would cause duplicates to be saved in the APTARE IT Analytics database. Therefore, in this case, matching on a host port WWN ensures unique hosts. With WWN matching, if different host names are encountered, a host alias record is also created in anticipation of future host data collection.

By default, WWN matching is turned off. A system parameter can be configured to turn on WWN matching prior to data collection.

To turn on host WWN matching, type the following command at the command line.

update apt_system_parameter set param_value = '1'
		where param_name = 'SEARCH_HOST_BY_WWN_IS_ENABLED';
COMMIT;

A value of 1 turns on WWN matching and 0 turns it off (the default).