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Solarwinds IPAM benefits over IPAM in Windows 2012r2.

davebryan37 over 7 years ago

Hey guys,

I have looked through some of the documentation for Solarwinds and it is installed in our environment, but I am trying to decide if we should use it over Microsoft IPAM 2012R2. The main features to me are the discovery of static addresses in use, and the ease of management. If anyone knows of a good thread talking about the advantages of Solarwinds, please let me know. It sounds like they both require you to import a CSV to generate your list of static addresses. I was hoping that one might be able to do a ping sweep of the subnet specified and either use DNS, or possibly WMI queries on Windows hosts, with supplied credentials to help reconcile outdated spreadsheets. It sounds like they are the same for discovery of static addresses. The one main advantage I am thinking Solarwinds has is that it uses a web interface so that I do not need to ask all the server owners to install RSAT on their computers to be able to update static server addresses. If anyone can throw anything else out, I would appreciate it.

Dave

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deverts over 7 years ago +2

Hi, davebryan37 , I'm not sure where the .csv import process came from for IPAM, but that's not 100% accurate. You simply configure a subnet, or (my preferred method) use the SuperNet Wizard to create…

0 deverts over 7 years ago

Hi, davebryan37,
I'm not sure where the .csv import process came from for IPAM, but that's not 100% accurate. You simply configure a subnet, or (my preferred method) use the SuperNet Wizard to create your subnets. During the configuration, there is a configurable variable, that is set to every 4 hours by default, to scan/update the network (basically a ping sweep like you want). Once it discovers all the active IPs, it polls configurable SNMP strings and DNS for node names. Very simple! Taking that to the next level, you can configure IPAM to update Windows DNS and use IPAM as your central point of administration. Then taking that to the next level, you can also create DNS zones from IPAM...and match up DNS zones to your DHCP server scopes. It all maps together nicely and most of time automatically.
I'm not saying 2012R2 doesn't do some of this, but using IPAM you can offload some of the day to day IP administration to other teams. Example: the network team builds all the networks, the sys admin and desktop teams can self-provision statics for devices (printers, servers, etc.).
Just my thoughts. I'm sure other folks have better examples, but it certainly simplifies my life.
D
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0 jkump over 7 years ago in reply to deverts

Funny, we are in the budget process for the next fiscal year and I put IPAM into my list of desired software additions, but then I was thinking about maybe we should just use the IPAM for 2012R2. I was just getting ready to post a question in the forum when I stumbled across this posting. I found your insight helpful. I will keep my IPAM request in the budget and I look forward to the day of getting rid of the "spreadsheet(s)" in favor of more automated tools. I was just beginning to work my way through the documentation so I now have some topic points to be on the look out for. Thanks! deverts
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