Appliance specification

The appliance specification describes the platforms used for the BMC Discovery appliance. The specification provides a brief introduction to the features of the appliance, and the basic tasks that you must perform to start the appliance for the first time. The specifications provide the information for each of the appliance models.

This section is intended as a brief overview and is not comprehensive. It contains information taken from the documentation supplied with the appliance hardware. You are advised to read the documentation to fully familiarize yourself with the appliance hardware and its operation.

Appliance hardware platform 

BMC Discovery is no longer supplied on physical platforms. It is supplied as a Virtual Appliance, or as a kickstart DVD which can be installed onto your own hardware.

The BMC Discovery appliance platforms are x86-64 based hardware that is supported by CentOS 6 or later (64-bit only). Only servers can be used in a production environment. Workstations and laptops are not up to production specification.

See Hardware requirements for more information.

Supported virtualization platforms

The BMC Discovery Virtual Appliance (VA) uses VMware virtualization technology to provide Application Distribution Management. The following VAs are available:

• Community Edition: A free download of BMC Discovery that is limited to scan up to 60 OSIs.
• Full Edition: An unrestricted Virtual Appliance, available after purchasing BMC Discovery.

BMC provides Operating System updates as part of its monthly BMC Discovery updates.

VMware supported virtualization platforms

The BMC Discovery Virtual Appliance is supplied as an OVF (Open Virtualization Format) file and is supported on the VMware platforms described in this section.

For production use:

• VMware Virtual Infrastructure (ESX/ESXi) — 5.5 and later

For testing and development

• VMware Workstation — 11.1.4 and later

Additional virtualization platforms

The BMC Discovery Virtual Appliance is supplied as an OVF (Open Virtualization Format) file and is supported on the VMware platforms mentioned above. You can also convert the OVF file for use with the virtualization and cloud platforms described below:

If you convert the OVF file, the BMC Discovery virtual appliance is also supported on the following additional platforms, though is only tested on the VMware platforms described above.

Hyper-V

Hyper-V requires the disk image to be in VHD format, rather than the VMDK format in which the BMC Discovery VA is supplied. To convert the BMC Discovery virtual appliance to Hyper-V, use the following instructions:

You must download a BMC Discovery VA from https://www.bmc.com/available/epd.html

Follow the steps appropriate for your Microsoft Azure or Hyper-V from the Microsoft Azure Migrate site .

When you have created a VHD image, you can upload it to Microsoft Azure.

Xen

To convert the BMC Discovery virtual appliance to a XenServer virtual machine, follow these How to Convert VMware Virtual Machines to XenServer Virtual Machines instructions.

KVM

To convert the BMC Discovery virtual appliance OVF package to an OVA archive, use the VMware OVF Tool. Once you have the BMC Discovery virtual appliance in an OVA archive, use these instructions to import the OVA archive file into KVM.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

See the following for instructions for deploying a BMC Discovery VA into Amazon Web Services.

The AWS documentation provides further information on importing VMware virtual machines to AWS.

Microsoft Azure

See this page for instructions for deploying a BMC Discovery VA into Microsoft Azure.