Discovering and registering assets in a virtual environment

As an administrator of a virtual infrastructure, you want to know the state of the virtual machines in your environment at any given time. With BMC Server Automation, you can discover the virtual infrastructure inventory, and automatically register each discovered host server and virtual system as a managed server in BMC Server Automation.

Creating and executing a Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job ensures that all virtual assets in the environment are known to BMC Server Automation, which results in the following benefits:

• Managing the VM — Having a virtual machine registered in BMC Server Automation as a managed server enables you to view operating system-specific information about the virtual machine, and provides the ability to run Snapshot, Audit, and Compliance Jobs against that information. In addition, you can browse and manage the operating system and application-specific aspects of the virtual machine directly through the BMC Server Automation Console.

  Note

  If an RSCD agent is not installed on the VM, the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job will still create a Server Object for the VM and you will need to install an RSCD agent on the system (for example, by creating and running an Agent Installer Job). This RSCD agent will enable you to manage the VM, that is, to perform operations such as running Snapshot, Audit, or Compliance Jobs, as you do on any other server.

• Controlling virtualization sprawl — Using the Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Job, you can identify any virtual machines that are contributing to virtualization sprawl. Virtualization sprawl is an uncontrolled growth of virtual systems, which leads to un-managed virtual systems that consume IT resources without being productive systems (for example, a virtual machine which is no longer associated with a host server, but still exists on the datastore).

For details about creating the job, see Creating and modifying Virtual Infrastructure Discovery Jobs.