Server Management Suite

I am looking to see if anyone else has seen this issue.  If a VM Guest was moved from one ESX Host to another by a VMotion or some other migration method, a new Network Discovery task of the VCenter will see the VM no longer resides on the Host it was originally found on and will delete the VM computer resource out of the NS. Eventually the Altiris agent on the VM guest will check into the NS and create a new computer resource. My issue is the Network Discovery task should not delete a computer resource out of the NS. I would expect it to remove the association it had with the VM guest and the Host, and assign the VM Guest to the new Host it now resides on.

I can see this action in the NS Logs by performing a migration in the VCenter of a VM Guest to another ESX Host. Run the Network Discovery task. The logs will show the VM Guest no longer can be found on the original Host and will delete the computer resource out of the NS. Later the Altiris agent will checkin to the NS and the computer reosurce is created, void of any CMDB/Asset data that may have been entered into the record.

I received an update today from the Case I opened on this issue.  The backline developers have identified this as a bug. Running Network Discovery with the VMWare protocal against your VCenter will delete a Guest VM from the NS if it discovers the Guest VM is no longer on the same Host it found it on from a previous discovery task. If you are using Asset/CMDB data with your Guest VMs it will be lost when the Guest VM is deleted out of the NS. In our case it was also causing an issue with the Site Server / Task Services. The Task Server was a Guest VM. It was deleted by the discovery task. Tasks stop working until the VM checked back into the NS by it's Altiris Agent update process.

An interesting note, our NS is a VM also. The NS deleted itself out of the database when the discovery task ran.

VMM , Network Discovery, VMWare , VCenter

Has this been fixed?

Not for SMP 7.1.  They do not seem to be addressing the issue for 7.1.  All that has been said is that 7.5 does not display this behavior, so they suggest I migrate to 7.5 for the fix.

We have not started testing 7.5 yet, so for now, I do not perform a VM discovery.