I have a situation where I have a QA environment where the machines have the same names as production, but with different IP addresses. Can I use my production Bigfix system to manage these machines, or will they conflict with the computers of the same name already in Bigfix?
There are no technical issues within BigFix caused by having computers with the same name. BigFix treats computer names like any other retrieved property and is not a unique identifier for your assets within BigFix.
You may see some administrative issues where users are confused by having two assets with the same name however.
Some things to consider:
You can target computers based on a list of computer names. Doing so may cause two computers to respond to the action on accident.
Try to ensure management rights are issued so users only see one of the two computers with the same name. Ie, make some users see only QA computers while other users see only production computers. That will help reduce confusion for everyone except master operators who see all assets.
Create logical groups to help separate the computers. For example, create a global retrieved property that tells you if its a QA or Production computer.
If you are running the BES Duplicate Computer Removal tool, it deletes all computers with the same name except for the most recently reported computer. If you deleted a QA computer with this tool it will pop right back in on its next report but it will be a little confusing to see the QA/Prod computers deleted for brief periods of time. You might want to create a new property that is a concatenation of the computer name and the Prod/QA status (example: ‘computernameQA’) and run the Duplicate Computer Removal tool with the -P switch to use that property instead of the default Computer Name property.