Planning your resource names

The banner of every screen includes the Smart Search feature, which enables you to find resource-specific information such as instances of resource names, serial numbers, WWNs, and IP and MAC addresses. In general, anything that appears in a resource master pane is searchable.

Defining a standard naming convention for your networks, network sets, enclosures, enclosure groups, logical interconnect groups, and uplink sets makes it easy for you to identify them and enables efficient searching or filtering in the UI.

Consider the following information when choosing resource names:

• To minimize the need for name changes and to make network-related resources easier to identify, consider choosing names that include the following information:

  • The purpose of the resource. For example:

    • prod for production network resources
    • dev for development network resources

  • For tagged networks, the VLAN ID

    NOTE:

    If you are creating multiple tagged networks at the same time (creating networks in bulk), the network name is automatically appended with an underscore (_) and the VLAN ID. For example, Dev_101.

  • An identifier to help you distinguish between resources that use the left side or the right side of an enclosure. For example:

    • left and right
    • A and B
    • 1 and 2

  • Examples of network names that follow the recommended naming conventions include the following:

    • dev_1105_A
    • prod_1102_1
    • test_1111_left

  • If you plan to use multinetwork connections in server profiles, create network sets that contain all the networks to be used by a single profile connection. Choose names such as the following:

    • dev_nset_A
    • prodnset_1
    • testns_left

  • Changing the names of uplinks sets can result in resources being taken offline temporarily.

    To minimize the need for name changes, and make the uplink sets easier to identify, choose names such as the following:

    • devUS_A
    • prodUS_1
    • testUS_left

• The appliance does not support the filtering of resources, such as server hardware, based on physical location (data center name). To enable filtering by data center name, choose a naming convention that includes the data center name in the resource name.

• The appliance supports the filtering of resources by model, so you can search for server hardware without having to include the model number in the name.

• The appliance provides default names for many resources. For example:

  • Enclosures are assigned the name Encln, where n is a number that is incremented by 1 when each enclosure is added.

  • enclosure_name-LI is the default name of a logical interconnect, where enclosure_name is the name of the enclosure.
  • Datacenter 1 is the name assigned to the data center when you initialize the appliance.

  • Server hardware types are assigned names based on the server model, such as BL460c Gen8 1. If you select a server hardware type as a standard, you can choose to rename that server hardware type to include the word Standard or some other identifier to help administrators quickly determine the correct server hardware type to choose.

• You can create shorter names by using abbreviations for resources. For example:

  Resource name	Typical abbreviations
  Enclosure	Encl
  Enclosure group	EG, Group
  Logical interconnect	LI
  Logical interconnect group	LIG
  Uplink set	US