Devices with duplicate MAC addresses are not discovered

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Cisco ASA devices with duplicate MAC addresses are not discovered in Smarts IP

Environment

Smarts 10.1.X

Cause

The issue above is seen with monitoring Cisco ASA devices in HA mode. Sometimes the standby device will report the same MAC on an interface as the active device.

Smarts IP determines that the two devices must be the same and does not discover the secondary device. If the same MAC is layered over multiple interface, then Smarts IP prunes the MAC to Interface relationship because of the ambiguity.

Resolution

Smarts IP is functioning as designed.

• To work around this issue, you can set the RigorousMACTest to TRUE using a Smarts DMCTL command as follows:  

dmctl -s <IPDomain> invoke ICF_TopologyManager::ICF-TopologyManager insertParameter RigorousMACTest TRUE
It is not necessary to restart Smarts IP Manager to apply this change in the active environment.

After running the above command, you can rediscover both devices in question and verify that both get discovered.  

• To make the change persistent across domain restarts, modify the tpmgr-param.conf file to set the value of RigorousMACTest to TRUE.
  The RigorousMACTest is set to FALSE by default.