Discovering Your Enterprise › Discovering Your Network Devices on Demand Using Classic Discovery › How SAN Discovery Works

How SAN Discovery Works

SAN Discovery locates SAN fabric devices (fiber-enabled switches, bridges, and hubs) and SCSI devices connected to the SAN fabric. It also creates Business Process Views in the WorldView 2D Map of the SAN fabric and the links between the objects.

Note: SAN Discovery is available in CA NSM and some other CA solutions. However, discovery of SAN hosts has been disabled in CA NSM.

• SAN Discovery runs as a part of the Discovery process and writes informational as well as error messages to the Windows Event Log. SAN Discovery launches automatically during install, or you can launch it manually from the Distributed Services window as part of the CA-AutoDiscovery Service (Classic Discovery), or using the Discovery Wizard or Advanced Discovery tool in the Management Command Center.
• SAN Discovery requires prior discovery of SAN objects by Auto Discovery. It uses SNMP to gather additional information from those SAN objects. If no SAN objects exist on your network, the SAN Discovery ends quickly and logs a message stating that there were no SAN fabric elements (SAN objects) found, or that no SAN fabric exists, and there is nothing more for SAN Discovery to do.
• SAN fabric elements are those in classes designated as SAN classes. SAN classes are defined as subclasses of Switch, Bridge, or Hub classes. New SAN classes can be added easily using the Class Wizard. SAN classes require one additional class level property (CLP): SAN, Boolean datatype set to TRUE.
• You can change default run time parameters using the Classic Discovery GUI, the Management Command Center, or the Unicenter Browser Interface, or you can pass parameters to the service on the command line. (Command line arguments are not saved as defaults and only apply to the current execution of the service.)
• If any SAN components are discovered, the SAN Discovery creates a SAN Business Process View. Under this Business Process View, a set of folder objects contain SAN fabrics, SAN collections (containing one or more linked fabrics), SAN-enabled devices grouped by device type, SAN devices discovered by SAN Discovery (as opposed to discovered by IP discovery), SAN devices that have no SAN links, and an Enterprise SAN object containing all linked SAN devices. The SAN fabric object’s label name is based on the Fabric ID of the principal SAN switch. All objects in the Business Process View—fabric elements and SCSI devices connected directly or indirectly to each other—share the same fabric ID.

After the initial SAN Discovery is run, you can rerun SAN Discovery manually using any of the following methods:

Discover SAN Devices Only

Executes an IP Discovery on the subnets you specify and only SAN devices are added to the MDB.

Once the device discovery is complete, SAN links are determined. SAN Discovery uses the newly discovered SAN objects as well as any already existing in the MDB to determine the SAN configurations within the subnets that were searched. The SAN configurations can be composed of IP and non‑IP (SCSI) enabled devices.

Typical IP Discovery

Executes an IP Discovery on the subnets you specify. The SAN devices are discovered and identified during the Discovery process.

No IP Discovery - Refresh SAN Links only

Re-determines the links of previously discovered SAN components in the subnets you specify. IP Discovery is bypassed and SAN Discovery uses only those objects already present in the MDB to determine the SAN configurations in the specified subnets.