Understanding and loading Field Certification

Products

VMware Smart Assurance VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance

Issue/Introduction

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

Environment

Smarts - 10.1.x

TCSA - 2.x

Resolution

Smarts IP Field Certifications are unofficial certifications that will give your environment basic functionality for the device.

IMPORTANT! Smarts IP Field Certifications are not guaranteed to allow your device to be discovered correctly.

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 EMC 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.
- 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 EMC 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

It is necessary to understand that field certification is an attempt to provide device discovery the environment basic functionality.

However, it is a good idea, and possibly a great practice to consistently check for a certification team confirmed device certification. Sometime a certification team confirmed certificate content can differ from a field certification. This can cause the discovery of instances and objects to be different.

Please note: 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 was an instance where a customer 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 customer having to install a clean install of Smarts IP in order to compare what had been changed in the broken installation.

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

sm_tpmgr -s <AM_domain> --reloadoid