discoposse

This is a hopeful message! I love that you've been able to get IPAM integrated with Change Management. The heart of the message is definitely in the first sentence. The accuracy of the manual tool is only as accurate as the operator chooses it to be. I've thought about going DHCP reservations, and with the "cloudy" way of…

As long as the hand-offs go well, this is a pretty good process. The separation of administrative tasks between teams creates a challenge to fully automate. Hopefully there can be a tighter feedback loop built to make the overall process more cross-team which could add value for all of the stakeholders in the process.

We in IT sure have the love of an all-seeing eye don't we?

The ever present challenge of big change and keeping documentation up to date. Always an adventure!

We are not alone!

vCAC really looks like the platform to take things a much higher level. Plus the chargeback/showback management inside it are great features.

Growth happens organically and then one day...boom! Giant network that seems like it snuck up on us With the dynamic nature of networks now, I think it's going to be hard to hold back from deploying IPAM. There are too many real-time changes and with "cloudy" solutions like vCloud, OpenStack and others that do dynamic IP…

All good Kevin! Each step forward is a good step. It is definitely a long way off for SMB consumers to jump in, but you may find that within a year or so that the cost of managing NV will lower, and the complexity will lower as well. Small steps in automation and profile-based delivery can be made even in the smallest…

There is definitely something to the custom built solution. I have done similar product builds in the past. It's difficult to find all the features in a single product.

It will be great to hear how things go as you progress into the DNS management side. It is an unruly monster sometimes to put all of this into a single system, and sometimes it just can't work for a variety of reasons. I've got a lot of work ahead, but these great comments are helping with ideas and letting me know it's a…

Great stuff Matt. I'm glad to see you've gotten value from it. I agree that getting to that next level of cool factor with it is a challenge because it gets back-burnered when other projects come up.

Amen to the decommission problem. There is often a much slower adoption of removal processes with orchestration. There is an inherent fear of automated deletion. You will find that vCAC can be a killer way to manage that side too, but that still leaves some gaps with external systems like backups and AV.

Thanks for the great detail. I like that all of the processes are known, even if they cannot be fully automated. The first step to orchestration is being able to know the steps!

+1 for the great disclaimer You've got the right ideas to get to the next step. IPAM will be a welcome change in your environment, and with limited segmentation the transition should be pretty quick.

We do have a long road ahead for many. Even the early adopters are still dabbling and mixing in new features with a lot of legacy still. There will be some very cool changes coming in the next while as this becomes more mainstream. I really like how people are starting to look more at it. Even if the implementations are…

Acronis is popping up a lot here. I should revisit their product set and see if it could be a good alternative for some of my process.

Great stuff Michael! Very true on both. It is a challenging time on both sides for sure. There will definitely be a lot of challenges with early adoption. This is the reason why most of the big players are using professional services engagements as a must-have for customers in the early phases. We also see lots of big…

I'm with you there Michael! We all have our inner curmudgeon that has some "legacy" processes that do some pretty impressive things. What I really hope to find is that sweet spot where we can escape the file-based management and not take the hit on custom development. There are some topology challenges with the NPM in some…

Thank you!

Every little bit is a step in the right direction.

Great point! Chasing uptime is rough because there are genuine needs for downtime and many systems don't need to be online 24/7. Balance is key

That decommissioning is seeming to be a tough one to wrap neatly into the orchestration platform. I'm not alone thankfully

Agreed that the single system may be a dream design, but not easily achievable. Definitely favor software based process over the old methods and I've had good luck with SolarWinds so it's a good logical step to push ahead and I like your choice to export to file for sharing info. That seems to be a common tactic that's…

I love it! This is a total SolarWinds success story Great to hear that you've gotten the platform to work for you Kurt. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the uptake like you've gotten, and I like how you feed the info back to Excel so that it can be used for other folks. This is a great way to satisfy the wide…

Great stuff! I like this idea as well. The ability to maintain the statistics, but at least suppress the notifications during known outages would be a very cool feature.

I agree on the challenge to make the leap to fully deploying IPAM tools. The environment never seems like it's that volatile that we need it, but we probably said that about a lot of things that grew beyond our control at some point. The hurdle for many I talk to is the worry that the IPAM is going to do something bad (a…

sed and awk FTW!

You've got a great, measured approach to it Byron. It is good to have a view on what's ahead, and it sounds like you've got a good handle on current state and how to move ahead if the need arises. This is a great way to be with all of the dynamic changes in the market. I am stabilizing things in my environment to be ready…

This is great feedback Michael. It seems to be a common theme for most. IPv6 doesn't seem to have as strong of a need but NV is featuring on the roadmap for many.

Great point Michael. I kind of glossed over the fact that the feature would be great in general and may not be tied directly to the patching cycle. Agreed that the scheduled unmanage would be a popular item for sure.