Terminology - Used vs Available vs Reserved for provisioning

We're considering buying IPAM but not for its scanning capabilities. We just want to move away from spreadsheets and preferably have role-based access. The datasheet says:

"While other IPAM solutions charge you to monitor your entire IP addresses range, Orion IPAM only counts your used/managed IP addresses. We'll scan & track your unused IP addresses for free and tag them as available, so you'll still known their status, but we won't count unused IPs towards your license count"

Does that mean that if my organization provisions IPs (e.g. two IPs needs to be reserved for a new temporary server that will not be accessible from SW) will they be counted towards the 'Used' status or the 'Available' status?
Can I manually add such IPs towards the 'Reserved' status or is that only for the network address and the broadcast address?
Can role-based access be set up so that some users have access to read the IPs only, while others have access to add new IPs?

Thanks.

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Accepted answers

Questionario

1.) they will be counted towards the 'Used' status

2.) Yes you can.

3.) Yes, we also use "read-only" and "admin" access to IPAM

All comments

Questionario

1.) they will be counted towards the 'Used' status

2.) Yes you can.

3.) Yes, we also use "read-only" and "admin" access to IPAM

macnugetz

Thanks, Questionario! :-)

hoodbu

In my organization, IP's get used and re-used. So suppose an IP goes from Used to Available at time T1. Then at time T2, which could be weeks later, I want to deploy a new multi-homed server and I see the IP Available. Since I am provisioning (aka staging) the server, DNS won't pick up the name yet, so I'm going to rely on the Comments field or a user-defined Custom field to populate the server name and NIC ID. At that stage, I'm assuming that I should change the status from Available to Reserved. Is that correct?

What are common events for manually changing an IP's status from Available to Reserved? What are the properties of a Reserved IP? I understand that the network address and the broadcast address are both Reserved, but what does that mean: that they will be excluded from a scan?

The tool keeps track of the Last Response time for a Used IP in a scan. Similarly, is there a way to know the last time the 'Comments' field was modified? This is the same as keeping track of T2 above.

Thanks.

Questionario

Hi hoodbu,

I am not too fond of servers, so I am not sure what you mean by provisioning a server... I am assuming it has something to do with the server not being reachable yet.

In that case, you can (we do) reserve the IP. in the comment you can put a date and the server name for example... we also add the person who reserved the IP.

If you leave "Scanning" on, as soon as the server will be discovered, the status reserved should change to "Used" (unless you turn off scanning)

Reserved IPs are not excluded from scan's, however you can exclude them by turning the scanning off.

There is no way of knowing when the "comments" field was last updated unless you manually add the date to the comments or another custom property field.

However, a workaround for this would be to first set the IP to "used", this gives the IP the current date as "Last Response", then change it back to "Reserved".

PS: If you mark an IP as "Used" and turn off scanning, it will always stay "Used", nice for productive servers that are either not reachable or only turn on during failover or disaster recovery.

@SW-team: please correct me if I am mistaken