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Thread: IP address lists in Excel for datacenter management

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    IP address lists in Excel for datacenter management

    When I started doing network stuff, it was all quite simple. You had one physical box. That box had one physical ethernet port and that port had just one IP address bound to it which was tagged on one VLAN. It was quite easy to build an excel table with all your bits of kit, to include their DNS name, IP address, subnet, gateway, VLAN ID, etc.

    Nowadays, it's a bit more complex - and I'm finding that to be the understatement of the millenium . I'm working with HP blade servers, using Flex-10 virtual connect with a bit of VMware virtualisation on top. Argh! ILO IP, ESXi management IP, multiple VM IPs...

    If that wasn't complex enough, listing all of that in a spreadsheet is a little tricky: the order in which you lay things out depends from which aspect you're looking at it. For example, some people just want to see the ILO addresses (one for each box). Others want to see just the VMware management IPs (ESXi host IPs). Others want to see all the IPs of all the virtual NICs of each VM, and that's just in one physical box. I'd really like to have just one sheet which holds all the data, whilst being easy to "sort" or find stuff.

    Of course, all of this info is typically held in some kind of IPAM / support system database which means you can cross link and look up data as you need it. Is there something in Excel that allows this or should I just look at inputing the data into a DB (again, which system, DB, any templates out there?)

    So for those of you that do IT management with virtualisation on top, how do you manage your IP / DNS lists? Any pointers for me?


    Ta

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    Re: IP address lists in Excel for datacenter management

    Bearing in mind that a VM with a static ip on a vNIC can (and likely will, assuming DRS etc) move between physical hosts I'd suggest that trying to say which physical NIC a VM's ip address is sitting on would be futile. Obviously host management IP addresses are going to sit with the hosts, but pretty much anything virtual can move.

    Factor in something like UMS (as far as I understand anyways, it's not my area of expertise but I believe Moby Dick should be able to give you some definitive answers) and you can deploy new host config on a per blade (and potentially per enclosure) basis pretty quickly, so even your management IP addresses can easily move between physical NICs.


    At the end of the day unless you're not making use of distributed vSwitches, DRS and the like I think you're going to struggle to keep tracks on this all with a spreadsheet. And if you're not using those features... why not?

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    Re: IP address lists in Excel for datacenter management

    Thanks for the input

    After discussing with colleagues, we're sticking to Excel. We have a template designed which is full of calculations that works things out for us.

    We won't be trying to link VMs and their IPs to physical hosts, as you say, it might all move around with DRS although we might not be using those kind of features. It's a small enough infrastructure to control which VMs are where and update manually if required. In fact, our sheet doesn't hold that association info anyway

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    Re: IP address lists in Excel for datacenter management

    For IP management have a look at some of the Solarwinds stuff - I use the Ip address Tracker for my homelab , which isn't all that bad There are more enterprise versions of it available if you have some spare cash
    http://www.solarwinds.com/products/f...dress-tracker/


    What you could look at is some form of config/change management software - but make sure its self populating. If you have to update it manually you are doing it wrong

    Having a well defined naming scheme helps as well!
    my Virtualisation Blog http://jfvi.co.uk Virtualisation Podcast http://vsoup.net

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