Here I’ll be discussing CI naming standards for different server and server like devices. I’ve been to many a-place with standards, which simply means that the name of the device starts with alphabetacorp-windows-999. Similar scenarios involve naming devices after a data center, or the OS flavor it is running.
Unfortunately, these are not very descriptive, and do not give anyone a good picture about the devices’ location, OS, classification, or application. From my perspective, a naming standard should be do the following:
- Be brief, as in Unix, so it can be type quickly over and over as required
- It should identify the following device meta-data in two to three characters:
- physical or virtual data center device is located in
- device role classification, such as production, qa, or developmental (I’ve used “p/q/d”)
- OS running on the device, such as u/nix, w/indows, n/nas storage
- Application role, such as w/eb server, s/ql server, s/harepoint, a/sap, etc
- Application sub-role if required, such as application server, indexer, etc.
- A two or three digit number, identifying the server farm, and/or unique sequence number of the device
- The name should become the CI name in the CMDB and the device, physical or virtual should always be referred by this naming standard.
Let’s take a look at some scenarios:
- d4 – may denote, data building delta, data center 4
tow – may denote the Towson, MD data center, or
zto – may denote the virtual data center in Towson - p/q/d is what I use
- OS, again, u/w/n and others (I’ve also used an abbreviation for a cluster pool)
- w/q/s/f, web, sql, sharepoint, file-service
- with sharepoint, I’ve used app/ind, etc…
- 99
So using the above, if I had a virtual server in the Towson data center, running a production task under Windows Server, as the Sharepoint DB, I may have called it:
zto p w s db 01
Again you may say it is very complex; and you’d be correct. However, imagine, a typical Sharepoint installation, with one DB, four App/Web servers, two Indexers, a CMS, and a BLOB device. That is only eight devices, out of thousands in a typical large scale installation. How would you manage?