Default language.

BMC Discovery Outpost system requirements

For detailed discovery of your datacenter or services in your public cloud, BMC 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. 

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. A BMC Discovery Outpost can be registered with appliances and clusters. The BMC Discovery appliance sends a request to an BMC Discovery 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 BMC Discovery Outpost executes commands to access the target details, and their results are encrypted and sent to the BMC Discovery appliance. When the BMC Discovery appliance receives the data, it stores it in the datastore as Directly Discovered Data (DDD). 

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

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

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

Installing-the-BMC-Discovery-Outpost

Outpost FAQs

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

Component

Specification

Operating System

The BMC Discovery Outpost is only available on 64 bit platforms.

  • Windows Server 2025
  • Windows Server 2022
  • Windows Server 2019
  • Windows Server 2016
  • Windows Server Core

Important

The BMC Discovery Outpost uses npcap. You must be running npcap version 1.6, as earlier versions have been seen to cause instability with Windows Server 2016 and later.

CPU

2 CPUs

Memory

  • 8GB (Minimum)
  • 16GB minimum, if you are scanning cloud, mainframe, or storage

When you discover databases, memory consumption increases with the size of the database cluster. For example, for a clustered database with three members, the BMC Discovery Outpost uses 1GB. If the same cluster has more than one database type, for example MS SQL and Postgres, the BMC Discovery Outpost uses 1GB for each database type; in this case 2GB. For a cluster of twelve with two database types, 8GB is required. These figures are solely for database  discovery, which is in addition to the memory requirement stated above for normal operation.

Hard disk

60GB

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 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.

Important

It is not possible to estimate the number of IPs that the BMC Discovery Outpost can scan by using the minimum configuration listed in the table. This is because the Outpost's scanning capability depends on several variable factors and their combinations, as well as the appliance sizing. The Outpost's performance also depends on the configuration of the appliance to which it connects. 

Ensure that you follow the appliance sizing guidelines to get the optimal Outpost performance.

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

 

Tip: For faster searching, add an asterisk to the end of your partial query. Example: cert*