About Automating Host Group Management
You can create, move, and organize host groups and link clients/servers to host groups through the Portal. However, you might want to automatically set up your company’s host group hierarchy and membership based on unique enterprise business rules and to move or link large quantities of clients/servers in one large
batch.
Note: In a Managed Service Provider (MSP) environment, the Application Administrator does not have access to the Reporting Database, so the System Administrator in a MSP environment needs to partner with the Application Administrator, who knows what changes need to be made to the host group hierarchy.
To make host group changes in bulk, use the PL/SQL utilities that APTARE IT Analytics provides. Instead of manually creating and organizing host groups through the Portal, you can run PL/SQL utilities to do the work for you.
These utilities provide the following capabilities:
• Matching. You can base your host group management on specific criteria. For example, if you want to organize backup servers by geographical location and your backup servers have a specific naming convention that indicates the servers’ region, you need only specify that the SQL utilities to match on that naming convention.
• Automation. You can automate how you create and organize host groups. You can automate how you do the following:
• Move or copy clients.
• Move and delete host groups.
• Organize clients into groups by management server and IBM Spectrum Protect (TSM) server.
• Set up an inactive clients group.
• Set up host group for clients in inactive policies.
• Set up clients by policy, policy type, policy domain, and IBM Spectrum Protect (TSM) instance.
• Load details of new hosts or update existing hosts.
• Load relationships between hosts and host groups.
These utilities communicate directly with the Reporting Database to manage and manipulate the host group membership for large quantities of servers. There are two types of utilities:
• General. These utilities apply to all backup solutions.
• Product-specific. These utilities only apply to a specific backup solution.