Can BigFix report capped cores for Solaris/Sun virtuals under Global Zone?

BigFix is currently reporting all of the Global Zone cores for each of the virtual servers under the Global Zone. For example, the Global Zone has 24 cores but the virtual guest is capped at 1 core; however, BigFix reports the virtual guest with 24 cores. This distorts the number of cores actually available to the software; therefore, reporting more software license consumption than is real.

I am sure others have ran into this problem before. How do we get BigFix to report capped cores correctly for the Solaris/Sun platform?

Can you please provide some insight, of what zone information you are looking for ? My understanding is that you have capped 1 CPU to a zone, and the current BES inspector doesn’t return this information.
I am not sure what “native” command retrieve it, is the output of command “zonecfg -z zone info” ?
You could open a case and submit a request to extend the “zone” inspector capabilities.

I generally work from BFI reports and am not familiar with the native command to retrieve it. In the example I gave, this could be 8 vCPUs if this processor had 8 threads per core.

We may have to open a PMR on this but that often takes a long time to resolve. I doubt we are the only company to have this problem with BigFix so I thought I would seek advice from someone here who has overcome it…

My best suggestion to overcame it, is to create your own analyses to retrieve the required info. The first step would be to find the correct solaris command. I have done a quick search and found the command “zlogin zone01 mpstat 2 2” that seems to produce the information that you need.

Once yoi have identified the best command, you can create a BES action that runs the command and redirects the output in a file. Then you can use the “file” inspector to grep it. The following is an example of the “lines of file” inspector that i got from one of my Solaris test system having all 16 CPU shared among zones. I guess you get only one line if you have one CPU capped to a zone. Hope it helps.

@ITSAM Does the concept of “capped cores” have anything to do with “DSD Mode”? There is a “Set DSD Mode” task in the BigFix console.

From the documentation:

If a computer runs the Solaris operating system and is in the DSD domain, set the DSD mode to ensure that metric utilization is correctly calculated for software that is installed on this computer. If you do not set the DSD mode, Solaris machines in DSD might not be properly identified and metric utilization might be underestimated.

@ITSAM You may want to look at deploying the latest Software Catalog and Application Update 9.2.16.1. According to the release notes:

Scanner version 9.2.17.0000 improvements
• Scanner discovers number of sockets on E7 series of Xeon processors.
• In hardware scan output CoreCount fields in LogicalDomains group on Solaris are filled with correct values.
• Scanner retrieves the values for Manufacturer, Product, SerialNumber and Type fields on Solaris x86 local zones.