Relevance/Analyses to know VM Manager name of respective virtual host

Usage and Config BFI
1

I have few hosts reporting under “No VM Manager” Data in BFI. So to pull out the respective VM Manager / vcenter details, looking for a relevance/analyses that can be created in Bigfix which shows respective vcenter/VM manager details. Please help with your inputs and code

2

When BFI reports “No VM Manager” status for virtual machines, there can be a number of causes. Have you looked at the troubleshooting guide found here - Troubleshooting No VM Manager data?

Every ESXi host (either directly, or via the vCenter that manages it) running a virtual machine which is participating in your BFI implementation, must be accessible by a VM Manager Tool running under your BFI deployment.

As far as I know, the VM Guest OS has no awareness of the host where it is running. The BigFix Client can only report back the Virtual ID of the VM Guest container . You need an API call to the vCenter or ESXi host to correlate the the Guest Virtual ID with the Host it resides on. This is the purpose of the VM Manager Tool.

3

That’s pretty much my experience too - on VMware side there is no direct way. You can potentially install some powershell modules/classes and depending on security permissions/access in your environment, you can potentially write some kind of audit script but that in a way is you trying to write your own version of the VM Manager tool…

I was able to come up with a solution for this same problem with Hyper-V (value “PhysicalHostNameFullyQualified” of key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Virtual Machine\Guest\Parameters” of native registry) and even take it a step further - ability to auto-identify Hosts with at least one VM that are not currently configured within VM Managers tool on any server but all that stems from the fact that you can pull the host info from the VM.

1 Like
4

Thanks for your inputs. In my case its not Hyper-V its VMWare-ESX/ESXi. As you said we may need to use API calls here.

If you have any other idea to pull the respective vcenter info of ESXi hosts that would be helpful.

Thanks in advance

5

We don’t have it configured/installed in our enviroment but the VMware Plugin within the Plugin Portal might be useful? Within the “VMware Resources” analysis that it uses there is a property called “Host” with relevance “name of host”. It might be worth testing it and confirming if it gives you what you are after.