What are the two methods of node discovery in a VxRail environment?

VxRail architecture natively supports two primary mechanisms to discover unconfigured nodes on a local network during cluster initialization: Automatic Discovery and IP Discovery. Automatic Discovery relies entirely on the proprietary Loudmouth service running concurrently on the ESXi hosts and the VxRail Manager virtual appliance. This service transmits and listens for discovery frames utilizing IPv6 Multicast (specifically through the Neighbor Discovery Protocol) over the default internal management VLAN 3939. However, if the upstream physical Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch fabric has IPv6 multicast filtering active, or if the incoming nodes are situated across separate routed Layer 3 network boundaries, this automated multicast broadcast will fail to establish a link.

To bypass these network infrastructure constraints, deployment teams must utilize the second method: IP Discovery. IP Discovery—frequently classified as manual discovery—eliminates the dependency on multicast routing by allowing the VxRail Deployment Wizard to directly scan a specific, predefined list or sequential range of static IPv4 addresses assigned to the host management interfaces. This ensures that node verification, hardware inventory checking, and node allocation can finish smoothly even within restricted or legacy enterprise networking topologies. Alternate combinations like "IP Loudmouth" do not exist within the product terminology.