Smarts NCM: Does Smarts NCM require DNS?

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


This article explains the Smarts NCM requirement for DNS.

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - NCM

Resolution

The Smarts NCM installation guide specifies that DNS entries are mandatory for Forward/Reverse Lookup, but Smarts NCM will also work without DNS also as per the testing done in the local lab. 

As long as Smarts NCM can resolve the hostname from IP address to the right FQDN and vice versa, Smarts NCM should be able to function successfully. 

Note that without DNS, the following should be considered:

• The environment administrator will have to ensure that every Smarts NCM server has every other Smarts NCM server in its /etc/hosts file (or platform equivalent on Windows).
• To avoid warnings about the appserver certificate, the environment administrator should ensure that every web client has the reporting and appserver's IP address in its equivalent /etc/hosts file.
• When users add new device servers, they will also have to pre-load such route-able addresses for those servers before the registrations will succeed.