Properties and servers
When you perform many actions in BMC Server Automation, you can use server properties to specify information that is likely to change from server to server.
Each server inherits a set of properties defined for the Servers property class in the Property Dictionary. Using the Property Dictionary, you can specify the properties that should be inherited by all servers (see Property Dictionary overview). At the server level, you can change the value of these properties to match the configuration and function of each server (see Setting values for system object properties).
For example, if you are deploying an Apache server to various platforms, you can specify a different installation directory for each platform by defining a property in the Property Dictionary that represents the installation directory. For Windows servers, you could set the value of that property to /c/Program Files/Apache. For UNIX servers you could set the property to /usr/local/Apache.
You can also use properties to organize servers into smart groups (see Defining a smart group). For example, you can create a property in the Property Dictionary called Owner, and then assign different values for that property to different servers. If some servers have Owner set to QA and others have Owner set to Development, then smart groups can automatically group QA servers into one group and Development servers into another.
Some server properties are considered intrinsic, meaning the property is derived from the nature and configuration of a server, such as the server's name or root directory. Some intrinsic properties are editable. For a list of these, see Editable intrinsic properties for servers.
After you add a server, you may change some of the server's intrinsic values by doing various things to the server itself. For example, you may apply a new patch to the server, which would change the value of its patch level property. If you want BMC Server Automation to retrieve and display new property values from the server, you need to update the server's properties, as described in Server properties - update concepts.
For more information about properties and servers, see the following topics:
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