Anchors and gateways

You can use anchors and gateways to extend discoveries to restricted network zones and to offload some of the discovery process from the TADDM server to improve the overall discovery performance.

The TADDM server uses SSH protocol to directly communicate with computer hosts and other components that it discovers. However, there are two cases when the server must communicate through a proxy to collect system information:

When using a firewall between the TADDM server and other sections of your network.
When discovering and collecting information from Windows systems.

Requirements information

For information on the requirements for Windows gateways, see the Windows gateways topic.
If you use anchors on the Windows operating system, for requirements see the Windows gateways topic.
Restriction: Anchors are supported on Cygwin 64-bit edition on Windows Server 2012 x64 and Windows Server 2008 x64. Make sure that the discovery user and the user that starts the service must be the same.
If you use anchors on the Linux or AIX operating systems, you can use only the systems that are supported by the TADDM server. For hardware requirements, see the Discovery server topic.

Running a discovery that requires anchors

In the following example, the discovery scope is the set of scope elements selected for discovery in the Run Discovery window. See Running a basic discovery for more information.

When running a discovery that requires anchors, ensure that each anchor is included in the discovery scope. For example, to discover a target that is in a scope set (for example, scopeset1) assigned to an anchor, both the anchor and the scope set (scopeset1) must be included in the discovery run. The scope set or sets that are assigned to each anchor should only include the IP addresses accessible by the anchor. In addition, if the scope sets assigned to the root server are restricted, they should include only the set of IP addresses that the TADDM server can access directly, including the IP addresses of any defined anchors.

Balancing the load during a discovery

Use the following properties to balance the load during a discovery:

com.ibm.cdb.discover.agents.max: defines the maximum number of agents to be run simultaneously on an anchor. This property can be scoped to a profile or a specific anchor server.; The default value is the value of the com.collation.discover.dwcount property.
com.ibm.cdb.discover.workitem.cooldown: is a general property and defines the amount of time, specified in seconds, that a work item waits before it is processed again.; The default value is 30.