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:

1. Be brief, as in Unix, so it can be type quickly over and over as required
2. It should identify the following device meta-data in two to three characters:
   1. physical or virtual data center device is located in
   2. device role classification, such as production, qa, or developmental (I’ve used “p/q/d”)
   3. OS running on the device, such as u/nix, w/indows, n/nas storage
   4. Application role, such as w/eb server, s/ql server, s/harepoint, a/sap, etc
   5. Application sub-role if required, such as application server, indexer, etc.
   6. A two or three digit number, identifying the server farm, and/or unique sequence number of the device
3. 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:

1. 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
2. p/q/d is what I use
3. OS, again, u/w/n and others (I’ve also used an abbreviation for a cluster pool)
4. w/q/s/f, web, sql, sharepoint, file-service
5. with sharepoint, I’ve used app/ind, etc…
6. 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?