Re: [nv-l] Master Map

[James Shanks <jshanks@us.ibm.com>]

There have been some good replies to
this issue, but I haven't yet seen anyone else ask what I take to be the
pertinent questions.

(1) What 's the point?  Are you
planning on instituting central site control or does your home office just
want to know what's going on in the regions, without having to ask?  Is
this supposed to be for backup or just information?
(2) Have you considered a low-overhead
alternative, like having multiple web clients, each connected to a remote
region?  Each of those regions could even make a separate map for
you with only the pertinent devices managed and everything else unmanaged.
 Call it the "headquarters map".  That's a lot easier
to implement, I think, than the programming you are proposing, unless you
are not using web clients at all.
(3) How big a box can you get for this?
 That's a key issue here I think, because that may well determine
what we can do.  I'm presuming that you were planning to have this
master NetView on a separate machine.
(4) Of the 4000 nodes at each of the
ten locations, how many actually fall into the class of those you want
to monitor -- servers, switches, and routers?   Knowing that will
allow you to figure out the minimum size box you'll need, memory-wise.
 There are sizing rules in the books so you can match the hardware
you have to what has been found in the past to be minimally  sufficient.

Consider this.  40,000 nodes is
not out of the question for NetView to manage from one machine, given that
he has good connectivity and a big enough box,  with lots of memory
and at least a four-way processor.   So your central location could
just start with a location.conf file to partition out the ten regions,
and  go from there.  If your regions have their own location.conf
files, you could just import those into the new one, and turn netmon loose.
  Just ten good seeds, a router from each region, and he ought to
discover most of the whole thing in a just a couple of days or so.

My view is basically that you'd better
off with a real central NetView rather than one which is just a shell.
 Even if that turns out to be infeasible from a performance view,
you could populate the database initially by letting netmon do it, rather
than loadhosts.  It's easier to unmanage or even delete what you don't
want than to load it.  Then you can try a sample our ruleset and update
script  and see how it works.  The idea of having a shell master
NetView is not one which has been studied, so far as I'm aware, so it's
not clear to me that you can get much help determining in advance how feasible
it is,  unless by chance, someone else has already done it.

James Shanks
Level 3 Support  for Tivoli NetView for UNIX and Windows
Tivoli Software / IBM Software Group

"Quinn, Bob" <Bob_Quinn@sra.com>
Sent by: owner-nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com

10/29/2004 02:11 PM

Please respond to
nv-l

To	<nv-l@lists.us.ibm.com>
cc
Subject	[nv-l] Master Map

Excuse the newbie question but ...
 
I have a co-worker who is not a NetView expert who would like me to make
NetView do something it is not designed to do.  I'd like to tell him
he's nuts.
 
We will have several NetView installations (7.1.4 FP2 AIX 5.1) in different
regions across the US each discovering and monitoring devices only in its
own region (about 4000 nodes per region - 10 regions total).  He believes
there must be a way to create a master map that does not do its own discovery
or polling (disabled in Options  Topology/Status Polling) but is fed
from the regional NetViews.  If a regional NetView discovers a device
and it is a router, switch or server (controlled by SmartSets) he proposes
it send a trap to the master console that will then execute a script  that
runs loadhosts and adds the device to the master map.  He also proposes
that status changes detected by the regional NetViews initiate traps to
the master and change the status on the master map.  I've read James
info that was posted a while back on changing the status of an icon.  While
each individual piece of what my coworker is proposing seems techically
feasible on the surface, the solution as a whole doesn't seem practical
to me.
 
So which one of us is nuts?
 
Thanks
 
Bob
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