By Matt Gowarty, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Cloud and Virtualization at Infoblox
For the networking staff, a majority of our day can be tied to requirements from other teams and organizations. For example, has it ever happened in your organization where the server team decided to move data centers or migrate servers to improve performance or security? If it has, it likely has impacted the network team as well because often the VLANs will need to be changed to support the move.
During a recent customer visit, the networking team told the story of how they had to deal with that exact situation where it was requested to help move over a thousand servers over the course of the year. When evaluating the requirement, the team found two major issues:
- A lack of documentation of exactly where each server was currently connected to the network, and
- The current process required a level 3 engineer to make the change because of the criticality and need to modify the configurations settings manually.
Like always, if the team had plenty of free time and documentation was perfect, it could have been done manually. Raise your hand if you live in that world.
If you live in the real worlk like the rest of us, you can quickly and securely handle requirements such as these be leveraging Network Automation with NetMRI.
I just published a Tech Tip on Automating Bulk VLAN Changes (thanks to Sif Baksh – Infoblox Professional Service Expert for technical validation) . You can view the details by following the link, but here’s a quick snapshot of the power of network automation.
- Create a list of server MAC addresses
- Cross check the MACs with the current connections
- Make sure it’s not on a trunk port
- Implement the change that match the search criteria
- Repeat tomorrow
Be sure to visit the Tech Tip for more details and work flow of leveraging scripting and listing capabilities to automate this task