Overview

The VMware Smart Assurance Topology Split Manager is a specially configured instance of an IP Manager that is started as a “DISCOVERY_MANAGER.” As such, the Topology Split Manager discovers availability-type (but not performance-type) topology objects and does no monitoring or analysis of the discovered topology.

The Topology Split Manager provides scalable topology management for IP network domains that contain a large number of devices. When run in normal mode with all operating features enabled, the Topology Split Manager performs the following tasks:

• Performs an initial discovery of the devices

• Splits the discovered devices across multiple domains that are managed by individual IP Availability Managers

• Creates a seed file of devices for each domain

• Places the devices that are listed in a domain’s seed file onto the Pending Devices list of the domain’s IP Availability Manager

• Adds proxy devices to the domains so that events from the IP Availability Managers can be stitched together correctly by the VMware Smart Assurance Service Assurance Manager (Global Manager) to point to the common root cause

  Given a large topology, like the one in Large IP network, the goal of the Topology Split Manager is to split the devices in the topology into a user-specified number of domains such that the domains are fairly equal in size and the number of proxy devices is kept to a minimum.

  Figure 1. Large IP network

  

  Splitting a large IP network into four domains—Example is an example of a large topology that has been split by the Topology Split Manager into four domains, each of which is managed by an IP Availability Manager.

  Figure 2. Splitting a large IP network into four domains—Example

  

  An “IP Availability Manager” may be either an IP Availability Manager (AM) or an IP Availability Manager and an IP Performance Manager running as a single process (AM-PM).