Bigfix + vmware?

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1

I have the vcenter plugin running pulling vmguest inventory

I am looking for a way to have the OS client know what the parent VM name is really, as we have multiple VMs which their Vcenter guest name not matching their OS/DNS name reported by the bigfix client in the OS.

I am also looking for any examples of how to read and set Vmware tags using Bigfix, ideally allowing the tag to be set in the OS and also in Vcenter so we can use for targeting and reporting.

Any ideas would be appreciated
Thank you

2

My understanding from documentation is that BF doesn’t associate a VM to a Guest through name, it’s through matching the BIOS UUID. They link to a few articles on vmWare about this as well.
https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/platform/Platform/Config/c_cloudtroubleshoot.html

Our environment is 99% matching, so I haven’t found a problem / verified this yet as I am just getting started with the plugin and have only inventoried 10-20% of our environment.

3

At the moment, BigFix has two solutions for managing virtual machines defined on VMware, not sure which one this thread is referring to.

Let me briefly summarize:

BigFix 9.5 (any patch level) and earlier: there exists only the Virtual Endpoint Manager (VEM) solution, which doesn’t provide correlation between the computers reported by the Management Extender for VMware vCenter, which represent the virtual machines as defined on VMware, and the computers that represent BigFix Agents installed on some/all of those virtual machines. If - for instance - you have 10 virtual machines created on your VMware server, and all of them are running a BigFix Agent, the BigFix Console will show 20 computers, 10 of which (those retrieved by VEM) with names that match the VM names as they appear on VMware interfaces, and 10 of which (those associated to BigFix Agents) with names that match the hostnames of the virtual machines as specified at OS level.

In BigFix 10 there exist two possible solutions: the legacy one (VEM), which still works as specified above, and the new VMware cloud plugin solution (part of the new extended cloud management capabilities of BigFix 10), which provides correlation between different representations of the same computer. So, in the same example as above, the BigFix Console would show only 10 computers. For further details about how correlation works and looks like in BigFix 10, please refer to https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/platform/Platform/Config/c_assetcorrelation.html

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4

i hate to ask this follow up but is the feature in version 10 part of the original lifecycle licensing or do we need a different license to leverage the vmware cloud plugin.

5

You don’t need a different license, the new feature is available through BES Support.

Let me add that - in this first release - the new feature provides VM discovery and correlation, but it’s not providing VM management (e.g. power on or power off virtual machines), so there’s still a functional gap with respect to the legacy VEM solution.

6

Its been 18 months since the last comment. Is anyone aware when VM Management, especially power on/off VMs is going to be introduced? Or has it and I’m missing something.