Determine computer type in hardware inventory

Usage and Config BFI
1

Anyone who can tell me, how BFI determine computer type in hardware inventory, from which properties does it decide if it is physical or virtual ?

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

2

If I recall it’s based on whether or not a physical power source is detected on the device

3

That sounds strange, because I have some VMWare servers, which computer type is registrered as physical by the capacity scan. The computer type from the analysis in bigfix console on the same servers is set to be virtual.

4

If you check the property for the type it’ll tell you in the relevance it’s using but I could have swore that’s what I seen the last time I checked it

5

The type found by the analysis is ok, the problem is the type determined by the capacity scan and used in BFI. I cannot find the logic used by the capacity scan anywhere, so I can see why it choose to set it as physical.

6

It is determined by scans, not by a property and not by anything coming from Platform side. I did look into it a few years ago cause we had clear cases where the data is just wrong but it was so low on the priority list never really got beyond initial analysis and to open a case. So can’t say I am surprised that it is still not consistent. If ever someone chase it down through Support and eventually ends up as APAR/KB/defect, maybe it gets fixed but just seems too much effort for something you can easily just import a property from Platform for and just disregard the BFI’s native property…

7

Wish it was that easy, but because of the mismatch in computer type, other of the properties in BFI is not set as expected, ex. server id and server cores, which is bad for licens calculations.

8

You may need to go the Support route unfortunately then. For us it was purely reporting issue, wasn’t really impacting licensing metrics…

9

Hello!
BigFix Inventory “Computer Type” is based on Capacity Scan result.

You might be affected by “VMware VMs with Hyper-V feature enabled are treated as physical machines.” https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/apar/IJ34778 - Fix delivered with BFI 10.0.7 release.

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