AUTOMATIC CONFIGURATION OF NETWORK DEVICES IN A CLUSTER BASED ON PHYSICAL DEPLOYMENT

A method includes automatically detecting an association between members 12 based on their relationship to one another; sharing topology and cluster information between the members; and determining roles for each member, based on the topology and cluster information and rules, wherein the roles are used to automatically provision at least one resource on each member, without user intervention. A method of configuring network devices 10 sharing a pool of available resources is also described, wherein the network devices have management connectivity between one another through a plurality of point-to-point connections 70. The method includes, after a point-to-point connection in the management connectivity is formed based on cabling of associated network devices, determining a resource index number for each of the associated network devices; and uniquely assigning the resources from the pool to each of the network devices based on their respective resource index number.