Management state can be set for the following types of objects:

  • Systems, such as routers, switches, and hosts

  • Physical packages, such as cards

  • Network adapters, such as ports and interfaces

  • Protocol endpoints, such as IP interfaces and STP nodes

  • Management agents, such as SNMP agents

  • Logical devices, such as processors, temperature and voltage sensors, and filesystems

  • Redundancy groups, such as redundancy groups that represent two or more cards or two or more network connections

    Except for systems (devices) and redundancy groups, the objects in the preceding bullet list are containment objects, which are internal components of systems.

    The ability to unmanage IP interfaces enables you to develop flexible management policies. When you unmanage an IP interface, the underlying physical interface continues to be managed because the status of the IP interface is determined by using ICMP, and the status of the physical interface is determined by using SNMP.

    You can unmanage the IP interfaces on systems where ICMP pings are not allowed, for example, of a firewall. When you unmanage these IP interfaces, the IP domain manager no longer polls them through ICMP. More important, however, is that the IP domain manager still manages the underlying physical interfaces through SNMP.