About Smarts partition

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

What is a Smarts partition and how do we set custom partition DisplayName?

Environment

10.1.x

Resolution

Overview:

Availability Manager only creates partitions with two or more elements.  More often than not, network devices managed by InCharge are not connected continuously due to various reasons. For example:

• devices are not in the seed file
• devices are not managed by other management platforms where the initial seeds for discovery are taken from
• network managements do not have access to manage the backbone 

switches and routers that interconnect managed devices.

As a result, the managed domain is broken into network partitions. In some scenarios, a failure in the network can break connectivity between the management station and all the devices in a partition.  Support for Partition in the InCharge Application adds the diagnosis of Partition Down failure. A Partition Down failure occurs when the management station loses connection to ALL the devices in a partition.

 

Specifications:

A partition is defined as a group of managed computer systems in the InCharge topology that are interconnected to each other, that is, a managed computer system can reach any other managed computer system in the same partition by traversing layer 2 and/or layer 3 connectivity relationships. 

Class name:  Partition

Root cause: Partition Down

ConsistsOf/MemberOf relationships between Partition and 
ICIM_UnitaryComputerSystem (Switch, Router, Host, etc.)

relationshipset ConnectedSystems in IPNetwork

• show computer systems in a network, similar to ConnectedSystems in a VLAN.

 

Configuration:

• Enable/disable partitioning through sm_tpmgr and discovery.conf
• Set partition DisplayName through partition.conf file

It is very important to notice that InCharge does not report failures on ANY unmanaged entity. It is thus important to notice the effect of that on partitions. If two managed devices are connected via two unmanaged interfaces, if the interfaces go down, InCharge will not send any notifications. Users could be mislead to think that because the devices are connected via unmanaged interfaces, that the partition program was going to create two separate partitions. However, only unmanaged devices cause partition connectivity to break. Unmanaged
interfaces do not cause that.

For more information about partitions, see the Smarts ip-manager-reference-guide.