vw4tools added host-munging to improve chances of pattern-based aggregation. This allows a derived hostname that’s slightly different than the hosts (to allow for enforced consistency) or to allow for some flexibility in the hostnames and entities.

This was created specifically for a situation where a customer had lowercase aliases for the A fabric, uppercase for the B fabric. Although this seems quite simple and straightforward, “A” and “a” are different letters, so the collection of SERVER44_HBA0 and server44_hba1 is much more difficult. The only host-munging enabled currently is:

–munge=host:touppercase

for example:  (patterns command line options edited out for clarity)

java -jar vw4tools.jar -N (source) --munge=host:touppercase -oresult.json

or:

java -cp vict.jar org.smallfoot.vw4.VirtualWisdom4ClientTool -N (source) -M host:touppercase -o result.json

The different might be better explained as OrderedTuples Output:

java -jar vw4tools.jar -N (source) -oOrderedTuples.csv
SERVER44,host,10000000c9123456,SERVER44_HBA0
server44,host,10000000c9123456,server44_hba1

This gives:

• (host) SERVER44
  • (hba) SERVER44_HBA0
• (host) server44
  • (hba) server44_hba1

java -jar vw4tools.jar -N (source) -M host:touppercase -oOrderedTuples.csv
SERVER44,host,10000000c9123456,SERVER44_HBA0
SERVER44,host,10000000c9123456,server44_hba1

This gives:

• (host) SERVER44
  • (hba) SERVER44_HBA0
  • (hba) server44_hba1

You’ll see that the second line of OrderedTuples has an uppercase parent entity. The first non-munge result shows two hosts, each of which has one HBA; the second example shows one (uppercase) host that contains two HBAs.

This matches the user’s request for all host entities to be the uppercase version of the upper-/lower-/mixed-case HBA alias or storage alias.

To ensure that vw4tools includes this fix, vitools adds the testcase to confirm that behavior is in the release includes/merged into vitools.