There are two places where you are able to view a list of the devices in the network topology.
- Under the Collection menu. The Device List.
- Under the Inventory menu. The Inventory List.
These lists look very similar, so why are there two lists?
The difference is Pre-Collection and Post-Collection. There are some other differences, but that is the biggest difference between the two.
The Device List is Pre-Collection.
The Inventory List is Post-Collection.
What does that mean? The Device List is a working list of devices. This is where you add/remove devices that you want to collect from. The Inventory List is the part of the snapshot and is a frozen moment in time.
You can’t directly remove a device from the Inventory List. This is because of that “frozen moment in time”. If you want to remove a device from the Inventory List, you need to remove it from the Device List, so that it won’t be part of the next snapshot collection. Then, after that new snapshot is collected, you can view the Inventory List and see that the device was removed from that collection. However, it is not retroactive. If you navigate to a snapshot that was taken at a time before the device was removed from the Device List, that device will still be present in those older Inventory Lists. This is because the device in question was a part of the collection at the time that those snapshots were collected.
Another difference is that the device count in the Device List may vary from the device count in the Inventory List. The reason for this is virtual entities.
Some examples of virtual entities:
- Nexus 7000 devices can have VDCs. These are virtual contexts that virtually segment the ports on the chassis into separate administrative groups. You can add a single Nexus 7000 into the Device List and it can appear as many devices in the Inventory List. This is because each each VDC will be represented as a separate device in the Inventory List.
- A10 can have many virtual contexts. In the Device List you add a single A10 chassis. In the Inventory List it will have a single device representing each virtual context.
These are just some examples and not an exhaustive list of the devices that have virtual entities that can show as individual “devices” in the Inventory List.
