About Discovery

When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, Discovery and Discovery Data Collection are performed using HP SIM’s discovery user interface pages. This allows you to use credentials and perform discovery and data collection tasks in HP SIM and enables hardware and software health status polling, monitoring, and event management for storage, servers, switches, infrastructure, and other elements on your network, such as enclosures, racks, clients and printers.

IMPORTANT: When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, if you initiate discovery from "Step 1 - Setup" on the HP Storage Essentials Discovery Setup page, you will significantly limit the functionality of the integrated solution. The HP Storage Essentials discovery pages are designed primarily for HP Storage Essentials when it is used as a standalone product. In an integrated environment, the HP Storage Essentials Discovery Setup pages can be used for troubleshooting discovery issues specific to HP Storage Essentials or to enable product health monitoring. For more information, see Troubleshooting” on page 685.

Before you begin the Discovery process, note the following:

If you have a problem discovering an element, try enabling Troubleshooting Mode. For more information, see Troubleshooting Mode” on page 702.

If HP Storage Essentials detects a device manager URL for an element, the URL is added to the HP SIM Tools & Links page in the System Web Application Pages section.

For elements that support multiple discovery protocols (for example, SNMP and SMI-S), only one protocol at a time is supported for a given element. If you want to change the protocol used to discover an element that has already been discovered, delete the element before attempting to rediscover it with a different protocol. For more information, see Deleting Discovered Elements” on page 78.

Scheduling Discovery Tasks

When scheduling discovery tasks, observe the following:

When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, we recommend that you do not schedule your HP SIM automatic discovery tasks to repeat over time because when the HP SIM discovery is finished, the automatic discovery tasks initiate the HP Storage Essentials discovery process.

Allowing automatic discovery tasks to repeat will cause HP Storage Essentials to unnecessarily repeat its identification discovery step against devices that are already discovered.

Discovery Data Collection does not default to an automatic schedule. In most cases, we recommend running Discovery Data Collection once a day during off-peak hours. For more information, see Discovery Data Collection” on page 67.

For a device to be discovered, you must be able to ping it successfully from HP SIM.

Discovery of SMI-S Devices

When HP Storage Essentials is integrated with HP SIM, HP SIM’s native discovery of SMI-S devices is disabled, and SMI-S discovery is handled by HP Storage Essentials.

20 Discovering Switches, Storage Systems, NAS Devices, and Tape Libraries