How to manage VMAN discovered VM guests as nodes in bulk

When you only have VMAN, your license have following limitations:
VMAN's socket based license will allow you to:
a. Add VCenters managing ESX hosts, the number of which is limited to the number of socket license you purchased from Solarwinds.
b. And you can add guests VM's as SolarWinds Platform nodes but the number of nodes you can add is limited to the number of socket license.

For example:
Assuming you have VMAN 64 socket license and you have a server running VMAN stand-alone( no other modules  are installed)

VCenter managing 32 ESX hosts and each physical ESX host is a dual socket server and those ESX are hosting a total of 800 VM Guests.

When you add the VCenter in VMAN all 64 socket license will be consumed.

You still have 64 node license though, and 1 node license will be used by the VCenter node, then 32 node license, one per ESX as VMAN automatically adds ESX hosts as ICMP nodes leaving you with 31 node license left which you can use to manage any vmware object such as VM guest as Orion node if you want to but only a maximum of 31 nodes can be added.

However, if you are running VMAN alongside other SolarWinds Platform modules that have "node" based licensing i.e. NPM/SAM etc. You can use those node licenses to manage more VM guests than what your original VMS socket license would allow.

For example:
Assuming you have NPM SLX and SAM AL1000 along with VMAN monitoring 32 ESX hosting a total of 800 VM Guests.

You can manage all 800 guests as SolarWinds Platform nodes since it will use NPM SLX to add each as nodes.

Most Customers run multi-module setups and have a lot of Node licenses to spare and they just want to keep alerts at a minimum.  Instead of creating a separate "down alert"  targeting non-node virtual machine objects you can opt to manage all the VM guests as ICMP nodes where they immediately get included in an existing "Node Down" alert. 

If you prefer to see OS level performance statistics you can choose snmp or wmi instead of ICMP. 

This article will show you how to manage the VM guests as nodes in bulk.
 

1. Create a Report to list all VM Guests that are not mapped to a SolarWinds Platform node object yet.
     a. From SolarWinds Platform web > Reports > Manage Report > New Report
     b Choose Report > Custom Table
     c. Use the following for the datasource

     d. Add GuestDNSName, Name and IP address columns

     
      e. Run the report choosing excel format so that you can easily grab the static IPs 

2. Once you have a list of IPs, you can use network discovey to add the guests as nodes in bulk.
     a. From web console > Settings > Network Discovery > start
     b. choose the list IP address and paste the IPs from the report. ( I'd do it in small chucks not several hundreds in one go, maybe 50-100 per run)

     c. If you only want to add them as ICMP nodes, just keep clicking next to bypass the other polling options. Once you are in the "Monitoring Settings" section turn on the "Include devices/nodes that respond to ICMP (ping) alone. "
option and complete the entire process and run the discovery.


Once the first batch completes, check the results and repeat the process selecting a different set of IPs from the report.