Product compatibility

Product compatibility matrix

Supported software

BMC Discovery has always been supplied as an appliance based solution. This enables the configuration of the solution to be tightly controlled, which in turn provides better support and lower costs, while maintaining a configuration optimized for the particular requirements of the BMC Discovery application. Another benefit of the appliance based approach is security which is described in detail here.

The benefits of the tightly controlled appliance can be broken easily by installing unsupported third party software. Of course there may be situations in which your organization's security policies may require certain software be installed. For example, anti-virus, monitoring, and authentication software. These must be restricted to a minimum. There have been cases where installing third party software has caused issues with BMC Discovery. To resolve issues on appliances where third party anti-virus and intrusion detection software has been installed, BMC may request that the third party software be removed to determine if it is the root cause of the issue.

BMC Discovery is not intended to be a general purpose Linux server.

Only the following software products that have been certified for installation on the appliance, and their use is supported.

• BMC PATROL
• RSA SecurID authentication
• CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
• BeyondTrust Password Safe
• Centrify Identity Platform
• Thycotic Secret Server
• Tectia SSH client 
• Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Agent

Risks involved in using unsupported third party software

If it is essential to install unsupported third party software on the appliance, you must carefully consider the risks and implications against the benefits of doing so.

Known incompatibilities

The following categories of software or operations must be avoided in all cases:

Patch Management Software

Patch management software may introduce conflicts with the installed packages comprising the customized CentOS operating system that the appliance uses. An operating system update mechanism is provided as a part of your BMC Discovery license entitlement. Monthly updates, where required, are available to be downloaded from the BMC EPD site. This is the only supported way of updating the operating system.

Backup Software

Extreme caution needs to be paid if the third party software is a backup solution. The BMC Discovery datastore does not support hot backups. Before backing up, all BMC Discovery services must be shut down and restarted once the backup is complete. If you do not do so and then restore the backup, then the restored datastore will be unrecoverably corrupted.

A simpler and more reliable option is to use the BMC Discovery backup and restore function.

Installation of software using RPM packages

You must avoid installing software using RPM commands. In addition to installing the third party software, these are very likely to update system libraries which may be incompatible with those currently used, or when the operating system or the BMC Discovery application are updated later.