Important

   

Starting version 8.9.03, BMC Network Automation is renamed to TrueSight Network Automation. This space contains information about BMC Network Automation 8.9.02 and previous versions. For TrueSight Network Automation 8.9.03 and later releases, see the TrueSight Network Automation documentation.


BMC

BMC Network Automation 8.9

All versions
BMC Network Automation is a web-based application that automates the configuration and compliance of network assets.
Release notes and notices
updated 07 Apr
The BMC Network Automation 8.9.02 release is part of the BMC BladeLogic Automation Suite 8.9.02 release.  

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This section provides information about what is new or changed in this space, including urgent issues, documentation updates, service packs, and patches.

Date

Title

Summary

October 20, 20178.9.02 enhancements

Enhancements available in this release:

  • Device and device adapter enhancements
  • Security enhancements
  • Job enhancements
  • Performance enhancements
  • Installation enhancements
  • Platform support
  • GUI enhancements
  • Reporting enhancements
  • REST API 2.0 introduced
  • Firewall rule enhancements
April 17, 20178.9.01 enhancements

Enhancements available in this release:

  • Device and device adapter enhancements
  • Rule enhancements
  • Platform support
  • Reporting enhancements
  • Performance enhancements
  • Miscelleneous enhancements
  • BMC Network Automation web services updates
  • BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management-related updates
September 23, 2016

Enhancements available in this release:

  • Network SecOps enhancements
  • Remediation enhancements
  • Device and device adapter enhancements
  • Platform support
  • File transfer enhancements
  • Reporting enhancements
  • BMC Network Automation web services updates
  • BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management-related updates

Tips

Ready-made PDFs are available on the PDFs and videos page. You can also create a custom PDF.

The BMC Documentation portal gives you the ability to generate PDF and Microsoft Word documents of single pages, and to create PDF exports of multiple pages in a space.  

Creating PDF and Word exports

You can create a PDF of a page or a set of pages. (Non-English page exports are not supported.) You can also create a Word document of the current page.

To export to PDF or Word

  1. From the Tools menu in the upper-right, select a format:
    • Export to Word to export the current page to Word format
    • Export to PDF to export the current page or a set of pages to PDF
  2. If exporting to PDF, select what you want to export:
    • Only this page to export the current page
    • This page and its children to export a set of pages
    For example, selecting This page and its children from the home page exports the entire space to PDF.


 




Planning

 

Concepts, architecture, deployment, planning, and system requirements.

Installing

 

Information about installing the product and migrating product data.

Configuring after installation

 

Required post-installation configuration.

Upgrading

 

Upgrade process, migration, and configuration.

Troubleshooting

 

Issues resolution, error messages, logs, and contacting Support.

Using

 

Interface descriptions, using the product.

Administering

 

Security, system administration, maintenance.

Developing

 

Development interfaces and toolkits.

Integrating

 

Integrations with other products.
What's new?

BMC Network Automation 8.9.02 provides the following enhancements:

Tip

For information about issues corrected in this release, see Known and corrected issues.

Standalone BMC Network Automation updates

The following table describes the standalone BMC Network Automation system updates included in this release:

Update
Description
Device and device adapter enhancements
Populating End of Life (EOL) data for Cisco devicesDevice vendors regularly publish EOL bulletins for an equipment they support. The bulletins indicate that you need to replace or upgrade that equipment within a reasonable time. BMC Network Automation can help remind you to do this by flagging such devices and populating EOL dates for these devices. For more information, see Populating End of Life data for Cisco devices.
Updates in the device adapters for better readability of configuration files

The device adapters for Cisco ACI, Cisco ACI- Tenant, VMware NSX, vShield App, and vShield Edge have been updated to properly indent the XML content that is stored in their configuration files. The indentation is achieved by including the new attribute, delegateClassName in the textProcessor tag. For information about this attribute, see Device type header XML element reference.

Note: This indentation introduces some discrepancies when comparing configuration files generated after version 8.9.02 against those generated before. If you want to avoid discrepancies, revert to the text processor included in earlier versions. However, BMC recommends to mark the 8.9.02 configuration as the trusted configuration.

Security enhancements 
Changes in the communication between an SSH client and BMC Network Automation SSH proxy server

For enhanced security, support for the following weak algorithms has been removed from the SSH proxy server:

  • Key-exchange algorithms: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1, diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1
  • Host-key algorithm: ssh-dss
  • Message authentication code algorithms: hmac-sha1-96, hmac-sha256-96, hmac-sha512-96

For the supported algorithms in version 8.9.02, see SSH proxy.

Enhanced password encryptionFor password encryption, now 128-bit salts are used instead of 64-bit salts.
diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 (key exchange algorithm) available only in non-FIPS modeIn version 8.9.02, diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 is available only when the FIPS mode is set to false because this algorithm is weak and vulnerable to the LOGJAM security vulnerability. For information about supported algorithms in version 8.9.02, see Agent and device communication over SSH.
Control over the type of files to be uploaded in BMC Network Automation

With this release, you can control the type of files you want to be uploaded in BMC Network Automation, as follows:

  • OS image files: You can specify whether to restrict OS image files to those that meet file naming criteria. For more information, see the OS Image Filename Filtering parameter in the Export and import section. When you load an OS image file in the OS image library or deploy an OS image, and this parameter is enabled, the file must meet the criteria mentioned in the parameter.
  • Stylesheet files: The file must be named with the .xsl extension. For more information, see Adding or editing security vulnerability importers.
  • Security vulnerability files: When importing, a single file must be named with the .xml extension and a zipped file must be named with the .zip extension. Only contained files named with the .xml extension are processed. For more information, see Importing security vulnerabilities.
  • Device adapter files: The file must be named with the .xml extension. For more information, see Importing device adapters.
  • Rule import task file: The file must be named with the .xml extension. For more information, see Adding a rule import task.
Job enhancements
Copy failed jobsNow, you can create copy of a failed job with only those actions that failed to execute on devices. For more information, see Viewing the jobs listing.
Performance enhancements
Thread pooling in reports

In version 8.9.02 of BMC Network Automation, the content for the following reports is generated using multiple threads running in parallel, rather than a single thread, to improve their performance: 

  • Priority reports:
    • Compliance Summary
    • Discrepancy Summary1
  • Status reports:
    • Configuration Comparison
    • Device Inventory
    • Transcript Comparison
  • Activity reports:
    • Change Summary1
    • Job Summary
  • Search reports:
    • ACL Search
    • Configuration Search
    • Transcript Search

For the Discrepancy Summary and Change Summary reports, only the report version which includes per-device details along with the overall summary while exporting or emailing, uses multiple threads.

For more information, see Thread pooling in reports.

Alternate home page for the BMC Network Automation GUIIf you typically have many devices (thousands) in a discrepancy state, and the display of your dashboard on the BMC Network Automation GUI takes a noticeable amount of time to display, you can alter the webappAlternateHomePage global property to set it to true. The true value causes the event list page to be the home page. For more information, see Alternate home page for the BMC Network Automation GUI.
Population of memory cache during system startupMemory cache of the associations between combo group keys and their constituent device keys is now populated during system startup in the background, instead of on demand, as and when the associations are first needed during running of the system. In versions earlier than 8.9.02, on demand population of this cache might cause a noticeable delay in loading certain pages, for instance, the first time when you try to view the details page for a device.
Installation enhancements
Database isolation level check (for SQL Server only)

The installation program now verifies that the READ COMMITTED SNAPSHOT isolation level of the BMC Network Automation database is set properly. For more information, see Configuring databases for Windows or Configuring databases for Linux.

GNU C Library version checkThe installation program now verifies whether the required version of GNU C Library is installed. For more information, see Installing the application server on Linux.

Platform support

New operating system support

With this version, BMC Network Automation supports Ubuntu Linux version 16.04. For the complete operating system support information, see OS support.

New database supportStarting from version 8.9.02, BMC Network Automation supports PostgreSQL version 9.6.4. For the complete database support information, see Database support.
Third-party software support

This version of BMC Network Automation is bundled with the following third-party software:

  • Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.8.0 update 131
  • Apache Tomcat web server version 8.0.47
GUI enhancements
Enhanced Job Filter page

On the Job Filter page, in the Actions section, now you can select either all actions or select specific actions by which you want to filter jobs. Actions are also categorized further for easy selection, as follows:

  • Standard Actions
  • Custom Actions
  • External Script Actions
Miscellaneous enhancements
Send the Device Inventory report as an attachment and include report URL

In addition to existing reports, you can send the Device Inventory report as an attachment to your email. For example, you can send a weekly notification that includes the Device Inventory report as an attachment. Also, now you can include a link to the Device Inventory report URL in the email. For more information, see Creating a notification job.

Discontinued support for French

Starting from version 8.9.02, BMC Network Automation is not localized to French.

BMC Network Automation web services updates

The following table describes the BMC Network Automation web services updates included in this release:

Update
Description
DeviceDTO updatesWhen adding a new device using SOAP API, DeviceService.addDevice() any current or trusted configurations in the DeviceDTO will no longer be used. Current and trusted configurations are solely managed by the system based on the snapshots of the devices, and so it was an error to allow the DeviceDTO to provide these configurations during the add operation.
REST API version 2.0 introduced

As in the previous version, version 2.0 supports create, retrieve, update, and delete operations on network spans and jobs.

Support is added for the following operations on various components:

  • Create, retrieve, update, and delete operations on the predefined jobs, rule sets, and rules
  • Prepare a new draft job from a predefined job
  • Copy a completed job into a new draft job
  • Attach a device inventory report in an email action in a job or predefined job

The value mapping and supporting component services are enhanced with new services to support the other oprtations (such as listing security vulnerabilities and Device Inventory report attributes).

See the complete API in Endpoints in the REST API v2.0.

REST API version 1.0 deprecatedThe previous version of the REST API is deprecated. It continues to function, but is not enhanced with any new features.

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BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management-related updates

The following table describes the BMC Network Automation updates included in this release to support BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management:

Update
Description
Enhanced firewall rules

In this version, ambiguities are fixed in the sorting logic for the non-overlapping firewall rules, which previously led to incorrect results or exceptions under certain conditions.

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Changes to the supported products and solution versions

This section describes the versions of products and solutions supported by BMC Network Automation version 8.9.02.

BMC Network Automation integrates with BMC Threat Director version 2.2. For more information, see the BMC BladeLogic Portal documentation. 

BMC Network Automation integrates with the following products to provide the BMC Continuous Compliance for Network Automation solution. For more information about this integration, see BMC Continuous Compliance for Network Automation solution.

Product

Version

BMC Remedy AR System Server
(Includes BMC Remedy Mid Tier)

9.0

BMC Remedy ITSM Suite
(Includes BMC Change Management and BMC Service Desk: Incident Management)

9.0

BMC Atrium CMDB Enterprise Manager
(Includes BMC Atrium CMDB Web Services)

9.0

BMC Atrium Orchestrator Platform
(using BMC Atrium Single Sign-On 9.0.0)

7.8.00

BMC Atrium Orchestrator Content

20.16.03

BMC Decision Support - Network Automation8.9.02

BMC Network Automation integrates with the following BMC and non-BMC products to provide the BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution. For more information about this integration, see BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management

Product

Version

BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management4.6.04

BMC Atrium Orchestrator Platform

7.6.03

BMC Atrium Orchestrator Content

20.14.02

Alcatel-Lucent VitalQIP7.3
Infoblox6.8.13

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Downloading, installing, and upgrading to the service pack

For download instructions, see Downloading the installation files. For installation instructions, see Installing

If you are upgrading the application server, you must also upgrade all remote device agents to the same version as TrueSight Network Automation. For more information about upgrade, see Upgrading.

Frequently asked questions and other information

 

This topic provides information that supplements the BMC Network Automation 8.9 documentation. It contains the following sections:

Frequently asked questions

This section provides answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about BMC Network Automation.

The following table describes where you can find information previously provided in release notes.

Type of information

Found here in

New features (enhancements) and other information

8.9.02 enhancements
8.9.01 enhancements
8.9.00 enhancements

  • Issues corrected by the base release and its service packs and patches
  • Issues that are currently open

Known and corrected issues

Technical bulletins contained information delivered after a product was released, often in conjunction with a service pack or patch for that release.

Where to find information previously provided in a technical bulletin

Type of technical bulletin

Found here in

Contents of a service pack or patch and instructions particular to it

Other information

Placed in context throughout this space, but listed and linked to in Technical bulletins. You will not have this topic in the first release of the product such as 8.9.00.

Flashes contained urgent information about product issues and are delivered after a product is released. On docs.bmc.com, this information is delivered in an "Urgent issues" topic, under Release notes and notices. If this topic does not exist for a given product release, no urgent issues have been discovered for that release.

Yes, all the content for BMC Network Automation 8.9.00 is in this space. The Developer guide which was in a PDF format in the 8.3.00 and earlier releases has been moved into this space under the Developing branch.

Product versionJava Runtime Environment (JRE) versionApache Tomcat web server version
8.9.021.8.0 update 1318.0.47
8.9.011.8.0 update 1218.0.41
8.9.001.8.0 update 928.0.36

The BMC Documentation portal gives you the ability to generate PDF and Microsoft Word documents of single pages, and to create PDF exports of multiple pages in a space.  

Creating PDF and Word exports

You can create a PDF of a page or a set of pages. (Non-English page exports are not supported.) You can also create a Word document of the current page.

To export to PDF or Word

  1. From the Tools menu in the upper-right, select a format:
    • Export to Word to export the current page to Word format
    • Export to PDF to export the current page or a set of pages to PDF
  2. If exporting to PDF, select what you want to export:
    • Only this page to export the current page
    • This page and its children to export a set of pages
    For example, selecting This page and its children from the home page exports the entire space to PDF.


 

Depending on the number of topics included in the export, it might take several minutes to create the PDF. Once the export is complete, you can download the PDF.

 

Additional resources from BMC

The following BMC sites provide information outside of the BMC Network Automation 8.9 documentation that you might find helpful:

  • BMC Communities,  BMC Network Automation community Open link
  • BMC Knowledge Base,  search filtered by BMC Network Automation Open link
  • BMC Educational Services,  BMC Network Automation learning path Open link
  • BMC Global Services,  BMC Network Automation offerings Open link
  • www.bmc.com Open link information about BMC Network Automation Open link
  • Documentation for BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management
  • Documentation for BMC Decision Support - Network Automation
  • BMCtv Open link , to view videos about BMC Network Automation and other BMC solutions

PDFs and videos

This topic describes and links to PDFs and videos that support this product release. If the ready-made PDFs of this space do not satisfy your requirements, you can export a custom PDF.

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You can create a custom PDF for a specific topic, a topic and its children, or a group of topics with a specific label. For information about how you can export a custom PDF from this space, see Exporting to PDF and other formats.

Ready-made PDFs of this space

or register to view the contents of this page.

Videos

The following table lists topics that contain videos that supplement or replace the text-based documentation. 

CategoryTopics with videos
Getting started
Administering

 

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