Brocade Communications Systems IP250 user manual IP discovery overview

3 IP discovery overview

IP discovery overview

NOTE

Discovery only displays products that are assigned to your area of responsibility (AOR). For more information about user accounts, refer to “Areas of responsibility” on page 194.

NOTE

You must have the Discover Setup - IP privilege to configure and run discovery. For more information about privileges, refer to “User Privileges” on page 1283.

NOTE

You must have the All IP Products AOR (area of responsibility) in your user account to discover new products. For more information about user accounts, refer to “User accounts” on page 185.

NOTE

IP discovery requires Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) or Telnet support on the device to determine device reachability.

Discovery is the method that the Management application uses to find data networking devices on the network. When the Management application discovers devices, it finds all IP addresses on a device and stores them in the Management application database. The Management application uses the primary address of a product to communicate with the product. The primary address is determined using the following rules:

•If you configure discovery to prefer loopback addresses (refer to “Defining global setting preferences” on page 60), and there are loopback IP addresses configured in the product; and the loopback IP address is reachable from the Management application server, then the loopback IP address is the primary IP address of the product.

•If you did not configure discovery to prefer loopback addresses, the original IP address used to discover the product is the primary IP address of the product.

The primary address is the address that appears on the Network Object Manager and other configuration and display panels in the Management application.

The Management application provides two types of discovery, simple discovery and profile-based discovery.

Simple discovery discovers the device with a specific IP address and/or DNS name. It is triggered by device configuration changes on SNMP traps, certain configuration deployments to a device, and adding device or rediscovering a device from the Discover Setup – IP dialog box.

Profile-based discovery allows you to define the discovery policy. It provides more flexible ways to specify IP addresses to discover. It also enables you to discover new devices from already discovered devices.

Profile-based discovery uses the following steps to build a list of candidate IP addresses to probe.

1.Discovery runs one of the following programs:

•On Windows systems, use ipconfig to find the default gateway.

•On UNIX systems, use netstat -r -n to determine the "seed" routers and extract IP addresses from the program output.

Discovery adds these IP addresses to the list of candidate IP addresses.

32	Brocade Network Advisor IP User Manual
	53-1003056-01