BMC Discovery Outpost system requirements

For detailed discovery of your datacenter or services in your public cloud, BMC Helix Discovery uses an Outpost, that is installed on any suitable Windows computer in the target environment. The BMC Discovery Outpost can be a physical or virtual server, and it can use an existing infrastructure server. 

Multiple Outposts can be deployed to handle segmented networks, and these can all communicate with a single BMC Helix Discovery service. Similarly, the Outpost can be registered with multiple services and receive work from those services. Outposts must be registered with one or more BMC Helix Discovery services, they cannot be registered with other Outposts.

Information about your organization's hardware and software is obtained by BMC Discovery Outpost. The BMC Discovery Outpost is application software that runs on a dedicated Windows server in your data center or on a public cloud. The BMC Helix Discovery service sends a request to an Outpost to scan the IP address required, and the BMC Discovery Outpost accesses the target by using the credentials that are held in a secure, encrypted vault. The targets are accessed by using a variety of methods, such as SSH, Telnet, WMI, and SNMP. Once logged into a discovery target, the Outpost executes commands to access the target details, and their results are encrypted and sent to the BMC Helix Discovery service. When the BMC Helix Discovery service receives the data, it stores it in the datastore as Directly Discovered Data (DDD). 

Multiple BMC Discovery Outposts can be deployed to handle segmented networks, and these can all communicate with a single BMC Helix Discovery service. Similarly, the BMC Discovery Outpost can be registered with multiple services and receive work from those services.

The BMC Discovery Outpost is self-updating. When a new version is available, you are notified, and you can choose to have the BMC Discovery Outpost update installed automatically, when it is idle.

The following are the minimum recommended specifications for the Discovery Outpost host:

To avoid any impact during resource-intensive periods of discovery, we recommend not to install the BMC Discovery Outpost on any host supporting other business services. This is true even if the minimum specification is exceeded, since the Outpost attempts to use whatever resources are available, to optimize scan throughput.

If you are scanning from a large cluster or you have multiple BMC Helix Discovery instances connected to an Outpost, performance may be affected due to multiple concurrent requests on the Outpost. In this case, installing more than one Outpost may help.

For frequently asked questions about the BMC Discovery Outpost, see FAQs.