The 'OperStatus' and 'AdminStatus' of Access Ports showing as Unknown

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• The OperStatus and AdminStatus of Smarts IP Access Ports showing as Unknown.
• When viewing the CLI output of the Port status command for a switch, the switch reports that there are Managed Ports on a Switch.
• Switch trunk port is not detected as a trunk port after discovery and gets classified as Access Port.

Environment

All Supported Smarts releases

Cause

The Smarts IP Availability Manager separates ports into two groups:

• Trunk ports
  A Trunk port is a switch port that is connected to a port on a switch, hub, or bridge.
  i.e., Connectivity (Layer-2 Traffic): When a port connects directly to another port, SMARTS is able to obtain the bridging-related MAC addresses between the source and destination.
  This forms a TRUNK relationship, and the ports are classified as TRUNK PORTS.
  
  
• Access ports
  An Access port is connected to a host or router system interface. By default, Smarts IP Domain Manager monitors trunk ports but not access ports.
  i.e., Connectivity (Layer-3 Traffic): When a port connects to an Interface (which is a NetworkAdapter participating in Layer-3 traffic), the MAC-to-IP address relationship does not expose the remote MAC address.
  Without this bridging data, SMARTS classifies the port as an ACCESS PORT.
  Access ports are only managed if the connected host or router is also a member of the managed topology or if the ports themselves are explicitly managed.

Note: Smarts discovery does not use the device configuration to determine a trunk port. It uses the bridging information from both sides of the connection to determine if a port should be marked as a trunk port or not.

Resolution

You can enforce a management policy that manages Smarts IP access ports as described in the documentation reference at: Interface Management Policy

Alternatively, you can manage Smarts IP access ports using either of the following methods:

• Discover the devices connecting to these Ports into your IP Availability Manager topology. An access port automatically becomes managed if the host that it is connected to is managed. Once Domain Manager is aware of these Hosts, the correct statuses of these Ports will be polled and reported.
• Explicitly manage the ports. To do this, right-click on the port and select Manage from the menu. Once the Management status is set, please Reconfigure the IP Domain Manager for the settings to take effect.