Understanding and loading Field Certification

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

Overview of what a Field Certification is, and how to load one in your Smarts environment. 

 

Environment

All Supported Smarts releases

Resolution

Loading a Smarts IP Field Certification

To load a Smarts IP Field Certification, do the following:

• Check for the existence of an oid2type_Field.conf file in the following location:
  

  IP/smarts/local/conf/discovery

• Do the following depending on what you found in the preceding step:
  
  
  • oid2type_Field.conf file exists in the local folder:  If an oid2type_Field.conf file already exists in the IP/smarts/local/conf/discovery directory, do the following:
    
    
    • Append the Field Certification information obtained from Broadcom for Smarts into the oid2type_Field.conf file. To do this, cut and paste the information provided at the end of the file and save the file.  
      
      
    • Please make sure that the field cert has the following line: CERTIFICATION = TEMPLATE as this denotes a field certification.  
      
      
    • Go to the next step.
      
      
  • oid2type_Field.conf file does not exist in the local folder:  If an oid2type_Field.conf file does not exist in the IP/smarts/local/conf/discovery directory
     
    • Use sm_edit command from the BASEDIR/IP/smarts/bin  

      sm_edit ../conf/discovery/oid2type_Field.conf  

• • • Append the Field Certification information obtained from Broadcom Support for Smarts into the oid2type_Field.conf file. To do this, cut and paste the information provided at the end of the file and save the file.
       
    • Please make sure that the field cert has the following line: CERTIFICATION = TEMPLATE  as this denotes a field certification. 
      
      
    • This will create an updated copy of the oid2type_Field.conf in the local/conf/discovery folder.
      
      
• Run the following command from the IP/smarts/bin directory to reload the updated oid2type_Field.conf for the IP domain to use:  

  sm_tpmgr -s <AM_domain> --reloadoid

• Check the server log file for any errors.
  
  
• Roll the log file, with:

  dmctl -s <IP Server Name> exec roll_log 

• Delete and rediscover the device.
  
  
• The device discovered now should reflect the certification that you used to update the oid2type_Field.conf provided that there were no typos or errors  introduced in the oid2type_Field.conf. file  
  
  
• If the device still shows as a Node, check the SYSOID of the device that was deleted and discovered and compare that with the SYSOID in the field cert that was provided, if the same then review the log for errors and confirm that the oid2type_Field.conf file was changed or updated correctly.

Additional Information

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Basic Expectations from the Field Certifications:

• • Field certification is just to enable you with work to onboard the devices into Smarts and full-fledged functionality is not guaranteed 
  • It is necessary to understand that Field certification is an attempt to provide device discovery and support for basic functionality using current/existing drivers.
  • Field Certification is a temporary workaround that can be used until the device is officially certified.
  • Hence, a field certified device would be classified as unsupported as it is running an interim workaround certification.
  • An official supported certification will be released as part of Official Build in future once Development Team picks it for implementation. 
  • It may happen that one of our customer's have already raised a Certification request on a device and your device may exhibit a different MIB-set than the certified device.
    This would then be classified for a request for re-certification, for evaluating both the MIB-sets (existing and modified) accordingly. 
  • An official GA certificate content can differ from a field certification depending on the Certification team’s review. This could cause the discovery of instances and objects to be different.

File Management Notes:

The only file that should be used to add new, or modify existing certifications is the oid2type_Field.conf file in the local/conf/discovery folder.  
Do not modify any of the base files that are installed in the Base Dir/IP/smarts/conf/discovery folder. This action is not supported by Broadcom. 

There have been instances where a user had copied all of the files in this BaseDir/IP/smarts/conf/discovery directory to the local/conf/discovery directory, edited a variety of base and local files. 

• • The result was a number of devices that failed to discover properly,
  • Multiple errors reported in the logs
  • And the local  oid2type_Field.conf to become unusable
  • Severely impacted the customer production environment and resulted in the user having to install a clean install of Smarts IP in order to compare what had been changed in the broken installation. 

The following command is primarily designed to compare the base files and reload the oid2type_Field.conf

sm_tpmgr -s <AM_domain> --reloadoid