Installing the Windows proxy manager and proxies

To discover Windows hosts, BMC Discovery uses one or more Windows proxies or BMC Discovery Outposts. After the BMC Discovery appliance decides that a discovery target is running a Microsoft Windows operating system, it uses a proxy or BMC Discovery Outpost to interrogate the target. Often, the proxy or BMC Discovery Outpost is also responsible for providing authentication and authorization of discovery activities.

Windows Proxies

There are two types of proxy:

• Active Directory proxy—Runs as an Active Directory user, and uses those user credentials to connect to Windows hosts within the Active Directory domain. Credentials are not stored in the BMC Discovery credential vault.
• Credential proxy—Runs as a local administrator user. Credentials are stored in the BMC Discovery credential vault and are provided to the proxy as required.

A single Windows host may run both types of proxy. To handle complex Active Directory environments, it is possible to run multiple Active Directory proxies as different users. The Active Directory proxy can also be used in a legacy Windows Workgroup environment to connect to workgroup members using the proxy's workgroup credentials.

The BMC Discovery Proxy Manager (Proxy Manager) is used to manage the running proxies and their configuration and to establish secure connections with approved BMC Discovery appliances. Installation of the Proxy Manager and Windows proxies is described in Adding Windows proxies.