Bundling reversal issue in BigFix Inventory and ILMT

[manojthathera]

Hi Team,

I am facing an issue of bundling reversal in BFI/ILMT Tool.
Whatever bundling we perform in the tool gets reversed and requires re-bundling.
I checked and found re-bundling requires only on the systems which have duplicate entries in console.
There is an article which mentioned to preserve registry of client/agent using clientidentitymatch by reverting VM snapshot. This is not useful in most of the cases where customer have clustered environment and don’t know which system will become duplicate in BigFix Console.
Is there any way we can provide fixed unique computer ID to each endpoint?
Does anyone else faced the same issue?
Any input is much appreciated!

[mbartosh]

I am facing the same issue, but I am noticing it with the collection of capacity data. I am getting “No VM Manager Data” because systems are duplicated. I have not discovered that the bundling was undone, but it may have been. I just haven’t looked close enough.

I was pointed to the following article by BFI support:
https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/platform/Platform/Installation/t_preserving_bundling_when_clientreinstalled.html?hl=duplicate

The problem with this article is that it seems like too much manual effort. In addition, if you can’t predict which systems are duplicating, it won’t work anyway.

[ssakunala]

Setting the ClientIdentityMatch to 100 should help to prevent duplicate computers in many cases. There will be some outliers that will need further review.

As for BFI, it uses BigFix ComputerID for bundling as more than one computer with same name can be present in different segments etc.

[mbartosh]

I think the problem in my case is that the advanced parameter ClientIdentityMatch = 100 is not working. I do notice that I have the parameter as clientIdentityMatch because that is the way it is in the documentation. Do you think the C should be capitalized?

[ssakunala]

clientIdentityMatch is the correct property name. I didn’t see any known issues with this setting not working. Please open a support case so that the support team can properly investigate this.

[mbartosh]

The issue is that our Citrix environment uses a system called Provisioning Services (PVS). Here is a definition.

Provisioning Services streaming technology allows computers to be provisioned and re-provisioned in real time from a single shared-disk image. This enables administrators to completely eliminate the need to manage and patch individual systems. Instead, all image management is done on the master image.

Our Citrix Team has all Citrix servers scheduled to restart every night. When they restart they boot from the master image which basically reimages the server. This creates a new machine ID in Bigfix.

I think there is timing issue with the clientIdentityMatch parameter. It does not appear to be checking for an existing matching client prior to creating a new client.

[ssakunala]

The Citrix PVS is an issue as the servers are rebuilt and most likely the macid changes each time. The clientIdentityMatch will not help with the PVS servers.