Smarts NCM: Application Server (AS) failure; AS reinstall of the software is necessary; How to re-register Device Servers(DS) after AS crash and rebuild

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

App Server crash and rebuild - how to register Device Servers correctly

Application Server (AS) failure; How to re-register Device Servers(DS) after AS crash and rebuild.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - NCM

Cause

In this example, the Application server has failed, and a reinstall of the software is necessary. This will not restore the system to what it was previously and the device servers will not be registered to the AS.

Resolution

If the AS is uninstalled and reinstalled for whatever reason, and there is a good backup of the previous state we can restore it. This will result in some data loss for the period between the backup and the last operational time of the AS. But once the restore is performed on the AS, this should put the cflist data back on the AS which contains the info about the existing DS (We are assuming here that the device servers have not been touched). In this case after the AS restore, things should work normally and there won't be any mismatch in the AS/DS data other than the data loss as explained above. This will resolve the DS registration issues. 

If a device server fails   we have to reinstall that device server   but we would then have duplication in the database because of the registration process. In this case there will be a duplicate entry in cflist as a new popID will be created so that should be manually deleted. This problem has been taken care of in 9.2.

If there is no backup available it is recommended that a full reinstall for both the AS and DS be performed

Additional Information

Please see KB article 173743 for details on removing duplicate device servers:

 Smarts NCM: Reinstalling a Device Server (DS) fails, but the Smarts NCM console interface and cflist command output show duplicate Device Servers; How to remove Duplicate Device Server from cflist