Network Installation Management Guide and Reference

Defining a Machine Group

Machine groups can be defined to collect multiple clients in a common target for NIM operations. Groups can be defined for standalone, diskless, or dataless clients; but a group can only contain clients of a single type.

Web-based System Manager supports two types of machine groups. First, a temporary machine group is created when multiple machines are selected in the NIM container and an action from the Selected menu is performed. The temporary group is removed when the action is done. If you want a more permanent machine group, you can create it using the New Machine Group menu option in the NIM menu.

In the Web-based System Manager NIM application, machine groups are not explicitly created and managed, but ad hoc groupings are supported by multi-selecting the icons representing machines in the NIM container. Once selected, a group of machines can be administered by selecting an action from the Selected menu.

Note: You can only perform most operations on multi-selected machines of the same type.

Web-based System Manager

Select the Groups container.
From the Groups menu, select New --> Group
Select the machine type.
Select a machine from the list on the right, and click on the < button to add the machine to the new group. Continue with this step until all the desired members of the machine group are in the Memberslist on the left.
Click on OK.

From SMIT

To define a machine group, enter the smit nim_mkgrp fast path.
Select the type of group you want to define.
Enter the name of the group and member information.

From the Command Line

To define a machine group, enter:

nim -o define -t mac_group -a add_member=MemberName GroupName

For example, to create a machine group named MacGrp1 containing previously defined machines Standalone1, Standalone2, and Standalone3, enter:

nim -o define -t mac_group -a add_member=Standalone1 \
-a add_member=Standalone2 -a add_member=Standalone3 \
-a comments="Machines for Department d03" MacGrp1