Helo Everybody
I need to install VM MANAGER Desconected.
Do you know where i can download it?
Desconsider Bigfix
What do you mean by “Disconnected” VM Manager? I’m not sure that’s a valid use-case?
No, there is no way to do that. A few years ago, I pushed for this very same via RFE/idea (BFINV-I-132) but as you will see it never got any traction. Welcome to vote if you’d like.
@JasonWalker, it is - we have the disconnected scans that are designed to cover cases where you are trying to scan environments that have no direct connectivity between BigFix Platform and the machines being scanned and that’s fine - you set those up, get a way to post the results to the BFI server and get it to import BUT there is no equivalent methodology to get the VM Manager data imported in a disconnected fashion! Imagine you have in that environment a bunch of VMs (Linux, Windows, etc) and a bunch of hosts (Hyper-V, KVM, etc) - by importing them as completely unrelated you are essentially skewing any kind of CPU/RAM/etc-based license metrics for software that uses those just because BFI can’t establish the Virtualization Hierarchy for them (and as a result any VMs via disconnected scans are also sitting in “No VM Manager Data”).
In fact, I do have another RFE for tagging disconnected scan results as “public cloud” from the equivalent problem (again, disconnected scans doesn’t allow you the functionality you get through Platform) which again is a product functionality gap imho.
As I understand it (and I admit I haven’t investigated the terms fully), the main purpose for the capacity scans and VM Manager data is to satisfy the subcapacity license terms from IBM (and perhaps other vendors?) who require a near-real-tine accounting of the host on which a VM resides…and the fifteen-minute polling frequency intends to assure that.
I’m not sure a disconnected VM scanner would be accepted to meet the subcapacity license terms? And if not for subcapacity licensing I’m not sure I see the value proposition.
But I’m not a lawyer or licensing specialist, I’m open to suggestions on this
That is one of the consequences, yes, but not the only one (capture real-life changing resources). The sub-capacity is also meant to correlate if you have the products on both the hypervisor and VM at the same time and license is per CPU/RAM/etc license metric. The VM and the hypervisor are essentially using the same set of resources, so if you are paying the full license on the hypervisor because it has the disconnected scan results then you shouldn’t be paying for the VMs and since the Virtualization Hierarchy is not there it will be counted multiple times (once for the Host, once for each the VM).
Thanks, that’s a good consideration to know.
I haven’t actually used the disconnected scanner before, how are the results imported to Inventory - are they moved to some other BESClient and uploaded from there, or is there an upload option in the Web Interface?
No, the idea of disconnected scans is you “install” (more like unzip) the scanners, run the scripts to produce results and then you work on your own magic to get them to the BFI server depending on your environment. Once they are there you just add “Disconnected” data source, so on each import on top of importing data from the BigFix Platforms it also imports the static files that have been uploaded to the BFI servers.
On normal bases we use this exclusively for IBM i but on acquisitions we do have isolated environments where we need to use disconnected scanners for.
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Refer this topic in IBM site.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/license-metric-tool?topic=disconnected-adding-editing-vm-managers
Nice! I didn’t know this was a thing
If you are looking to install additional VM Manager tools, the ID 84: Install Additional VM Manager Tool (OPTIONAL) (9.2.32.0) task from ILMT site can be used to install the Tool. Once installed, follow the steps from above link to configure the connections.
If the distributed setup is done, then the VM Manager tool results upload task also will need to be run to upload the files.
It is additional technically but we need it to work in disconnected fashion. Imagine you have a bunch of machines in completely isolated environment and have NO BigFix client. We use disconnected scanners to bring their scan data but we have no way to bring their VM Manager data (install the VM Managers without BigFIx; run it to produce results; then manually upload the results to BFI)…
Hi ageorgiev.
Correct. But my problem, i don’t have the package VM MANAGER to install in my enviroment.
Do you know where download it?
Yes, that’s a gap for isolated environments.
Yea, it’s not available. Even if you download it from BigFix task and the prefetch statement and get it installed manually, you don’t have a way to get BFI server to import that data… It’s just not designed to do so unfortunately, hence the RFE/Idea I posted above.
I understood. My scenario is exactly this. I’m using disconnected scanners to capture the metrics, I do the magic to import them into the BFI.
I am needing to capture the PVU subcapacity information which is depending on the VM MANAGER information.
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The topic @o.freitas gave above at VM MANAGER DISCONECTED has a description of how to obtain the disconnected VM Manager (copying it from your ILMT / Inventory server), installing on your disconnected VM Manager host, performing scans, and generating the oackage for upload.
The results appear to be merged with your disconnected scanner results, and import into the Inventory / ILMT as an external data source the same way.
You’ll need to navigate around the related links, but it appears to do what you are asking.
That’s interesting because the official word from HCL was that this is unsupported and it is not documented anywhere on HCL side for sure. I don’t have any instances where I can test it but that may actually work - I will try it next time I have an opportunity.
@o.freitas, this is the prefetch statement in the add “Install Additional VM Manager Tool” task that was mentioned above, so you should be able to download the latest version of VM Manager from there:
prefetch VMManagerDataCollector-windows.zip sha1:bd940230a19a1df64bb1ce5ae7be6651fe23db47 size:82635854 http://software.bigfix.com/download/tema/VMMAN_Tool/10.0.13.0/VMManagerDataCollector-20230607-1539-windows-x86_64.zip sha256:a17b34d31b8ad23acb6c55940b836d971ed16d92fa90485f7de690f4540250ca
It’s interesting that the Disconncted Scanner Packages are different for ILMT and BFI. The following ILMT documentation talks about how to collect the VM Manager Data in Disconnected mode
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/license-metric-tool?topic=data-disconnected-vm-manager-tool
The “automation” folder is not part of the BFI disconnected scanner.
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It’s exactly the model I’m using. My environment only has four servers that I need to check the licenses. That’s why I didn’t choose to use BIGFIX.
Thanks for your help.
Do you have the link for linux?