I’m just now starting to look into Tivoli’s package for ESXi 5.5 and I’m a little stumped. The first question I have is how do we install the agent? I went to the bigfix site, http://support.bigfix.com/bes/install/besclients-nonwindows.html#vmware
and there are no instructions on how to install. I assumed that it would just use RPM but RPM is not loaded in my ESX server.
The second question I have is when I look at the ESX site within IEM I notice that none of the fixlets have any actions. Is the only purpose of the agent to inform us that the server is out of date? Can I do any actual patching via Tivoli?
I don’t believe that ESXi allows the installation of an Agent on the hypervisor. I believe there is a way for the Agent to access the ESXi hypervisor via a VCenter console. It’s on my to-do list to look into this myself.
So starting with all of the ESXi hypervisors, VMware actually locked down their hypervisor operating system and prevented users from just installing arbitrary things. So you can’t actually install the TEM client on these endpoints like normal…
What we do instead is use the proxy agent to report information back on the ESXi endpoints using the VMware APIs.