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Important This documentation space contains information about the on-premises version of BMC Helix Discovery. If you are using the SaaS version of BMC Helix Discovery, see BMC Helix Discovery (SaaS).

Installing from Kickstart media

You can install BMC Discovery by using a virtual appliance or kickstart media. To install BMC Discovery from kickstart media, first download the kickstart image from the BMC Electronic Product Distribution (EPD) site. The image is large, approximately 10 GB. Before installing, make sure that you read the Before you begin section. For more information about installing on virtual appliance, see Installing-the-virtual-appliance.

You can install BMC Discovery using a DVD or a downloaded Open Virtualization Format (OVF) virtual machine. 

Although Advanced Storage options are available in the OS installer, they are not supported by BMC Discovery.

Related topics

Logging-in-to-the-system

Installing-the-virtual-appliance

Deploying-BMC-Discovery-in-the-cloud

Installing-BMC-Discovery-Proxy-Manager

Warning

No OS customizations are supported on the appliance

The BMC Discovery software is delivered as an appliance model, virtual or physical, which includes the entire software stack from the OS and the BMC application software. The OS must not be treated for general purpose use, but rather as a tightly integrated part of the BMC Discovery solution. This includes changes to the locale, the appliance is only supported with the English language: LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"

We reserve the right to withdraw support, and make no guarantees that future upgrades will be compatible or maintain any of those customizations. We may ask for customizations to be removed for testing purposes. In practice, we will try and provide support for issues that are unrelated to the OS layer.

Warning

Third-party software

BMC Discoveryis built as an appliance that is not intended to have any additional software installed on it. If you have an urgent business need to install additional software on the appliance, see the third party software support page.

At the end of your BMC Discovery installation, you should ensure that you have configured networking to suit your environment. For example, if your installation uses a static IP address, you must specify appropriate DNS settings. You can add DNS entries through the UI in the Administration page. See Configuring-name-resolution-settings for more information.

Before you begin 

Before installing BMC Discovery from the kickstart, make sure that you fulfill the following:

  • You must be an experienced Linux system administrator.
  • You must have read the Hardware-requirements page for clusters and standalone appliances.
  • You must have read the Appliance sizing guidelines.
  • You must install BMC Discovery on x86-64 based hardware that is supported by Oracle Linux 9. Installation on 32-bit machines is not possible.
  • You must use BIOS boot, you might have to disable UEFI boot to do this.
Warning

Do not customize the installed packages

The installation provides the opportunity to customize the installed packages. You must not do this. The configuration of the appliance is tightly controlled, which provides better supportability and lower costs, while maintaining a configuration optimized for the particular requirements of the BMC Discovery application. Additional packages may compromise the security, performance, and stability of the appliance.

Appliance sizing guidelines 

You might need to consider many factors when specifying the configuration of the appliance. Every environment is different and consequently the data published here is purely a guide as to how to configure your appliance.

Click here to expand...

There are many factors to be taken into consideration when specifying the configuration of the appliance. Every environment is different and consequently the data published here is purely a guide as to how to configure your appliance.

Based on the deployment scenarios, the following guidelines contain information about the recommended hardware requirements and configurations for your environments.

Related topics

System-requirements

Performance-tuning-and-benchmarks

Installing-the-virtual-appliance

Sizing guidelines

This section defines four classes of appliance deployment, which broadly follow how BMC Discovery is deployed in the field. These classes are differentiated by the number of Operating System Instances (OSIs) that are scanned by BMC Discovery. An OSI is a host, switch, router, storage device, printer, and so on.

The names given to these classes are of use only in this document and do not relate to the various editions of BMC Discovery. 

Note

The following initial guidelines are based on typical deployments of standalone systems in the field, and are intended to serve only as recommended configurations for your environment.

The four classes are:

  • Proof of Concept—Small, time-limited test deployments of BMC Discovery, scanning up to 150 OSIs. The Proof of Concept class has minimal storage allowance as they are only intended for a limited period of scanning such as a week long trial. For longer periods or a continuously used development or UAT system, the Baseline class is the minimum recommended.
  • Baseline—A typical baseline as offered by BMC. Scanning up to 500 OSIs.
  • Datacentre—A typical large scale deployment. Scanning up to 5000 OSIs.
  • Consolidated Enterprise—Enterprise scale deployments, typically a Consolidation Appliance taking feeds from many Scanning Appliances. Typically scanning or consolidating of the order of 20000 OSIs or more. At these levels, a weekly scanning or focused scanning strategy may need to be adopted.

Memory and swap considerations

The recommended figures for memory provide a good level of performance in typical scenarios. The upper level should not be considered a limit, as BMC Discovery will make use of all available memory. Note that the operating system will often make use of some swap, even if there is plenty of RAM available – the use of swap is not in itself a sign that there is insufficient RAM, just a consequence of the operating system optimizing all of its memory resources.

If RAM is available, the OS uses some as a filesystem cache which dramatically improves system performance. As datastore files grow, a correspondingly large increase in RAM can help to maintain levels of performance. In many cases, the datastore files are very large, of the order of 10 to 100 GB. For example, for a large datastore, performance improvements have been seen by increasing RAM from 32 GB to 128 GB and further still to 256 GB.

The recommended figures for swap can be exceeded; there is no harm in doing so, and having more swap can mean more RAM is available for buffers and caches, improving performance. All virtual appliances are initially configured with 8 GB swap. Memory and swap usage depends on the nature of the discovery being performed, with Mainframe and VMware (vCenter/vSphere) devices requiring more than basic UNIX and Windows devices, where the following tables refer to CPUs, full use of a logical CPU (core) is assumed. For example, if eight CPUs are required, then you may provide them in the following ways:

  • Eight virtual CPUs in your virtualization platform, such as VMware Infrastructure.
  • Four dual core physical CPUs.
  • Two quad core physical CPUs.

Appliance sizing guidelines

Resource

POC
(up to 150 OSIs)

Baseline
(up to 500 OSIs)

Datacentre
(up to 5000 OSIs)

Consolidated Enterprise
(scanning or consolidating of the order of 20000 OSIs or more)

CPUs

2

2

8

8

RAM
(GB) available to OS.

16

16

16 to 64

64 or more

Swap Space
(GB)

32

32

32 to 64

64 or more

DB Disk (GB) - No backup

100

100

1024

1024

DB Disk (GB) - With local backup

200

200

1024

1024

Sizing guidelines for virtual and cloud-based appliances

Before deploying any virtual appliance, make sure that you follow these sizing guidelines. In previous releases, sizing guidelines were provided by defining classes of appliance deployment, but these classes are no longer valid for clustered deployments. The earlier sizing guidelines still have some relevance for single appliance deployments but where scale is required, you can use clusters, or add additional machines to an existing cluster.

If RAM is available, the OS uses some as a filesystem cache, which dramatically improves system performance. As datastore files grow, a correspondingly large increase in RAM can help to maintain levels of performance. In many cases, the datastore files are very large, of the order of 10 to 100 GB. For example, for a large datastore, performance improvements have been seen by increasing RAM from 32 GB to 128 GB and further still to 256 GB.

The appliance specification page in the UI retains the classes for standalone deployments but not in clusters. We are reviewing BMC Discovery performance as versions are deployed and might extend our recommendations based on our customers' real experiences.

Note

We recommend that the CPU and RAM resources that are allocated to the BMC Discovery appliance are reserved, and are not shared with other VMware guest operating systems. Otherwise, performance might be inconsistent and might not achieve expectations. For more information, contact your VMware administrator.

Sizing guidelines for the integration with BMC Helix Operations Management

BMC Helix Operations Management adds additional load to BMC Discovery. Hence, if the system is already overloaded (insufficient RAM or CPU), additional BMC Helix Operations Management services might not be served as expected. For the seamless integration of BMC Helix Operations Management and BMC Discovery, ensure an additional 10% disk space to fulfill sizing storage requirements.

We recommend that for best performance, you use two logical disks. For single disk installations, your sizing calculations must be based on the size of the database plus the size of the OS disk (146 GB).

Installing BMC Discovery

Warning

Partitioning destroys all data on disks

Installing BMC Discovery involves partitioning your disks. Partitioning disks destroys any data on those disks. Therefore, you must understand partitioning before installing BMC Discovery.

To install BMC Discovery from a kickstart:

  1. Boot your host using the kickstart media.
    For more information, see the documentation supplied with the hardware platform. A splash screen appears, which enables you to select installer options (press F2 to see more information). Choose from the following options:
    • installto install on a system configured as specified in Appliance-specification. This option performs an installation that completely overwrites any data on the system, and enables you to set network configuration, keyboard layout, language and timezone. BMC Discovery will always be installed onto the first disk. Additional disks can be configured from the BMC Discovery UI when the install is complete.

    • customenables you to customize disk partitioning, but is otherwise identical to the install option. Always use the install option in preference to the custom option, even if you have multiple disks. Should you use custom to create a non-standard disk layout, the Disk Configuration feature will not be able to manage BMC Discovery storage. When using the custom option, ensure that the /boot partition is 750 MB as in the default partitioning scheme.

      Note

      At this stage you can specify boot options if, for example, you want to customize the install. However, this is not supported. See the OS documentation for information on boot options.

  2. Specify one of the supported options at the boot: prompt and press Enter.
    The OS installer starts. 
  3. For the language to use during installation, select English, and click Continue.
  4. From the KEYBOARD section, select the appropriate keyboard for the system, and click Done.
  5. In the NETWORK & HOSTNAME section, enter a host name, for example, appliance01 and click Apply.

    1. Select and enable the first ethernet device, the name varies depending on the hardware. For example, it might be ens160.

      Note

      You must enable a network device; they are disabled by default. To do so, click the slider button so that ON is visible. Failing to do so will mean the network device does not activate when the appliance boots.

    2. If you have any other network interfaces, enable those.
    3. Click Done.
  6. From DATE & TIME, select your timezone. Do not enable Network Time (NTP) in the installer, you should do that from the UI after you have completed the installation. Click Done.
  7. From INSTALLATION SUMMARY, click Begin Installation.
  8. When the installation has completed, remove or unmount the kickstart media and click Reboot. The installation is now complete. If you have more than one disk, configure them post-installation using the disk configuration utility.
  9. Once the appliance reboots, you can access the UI. You are immediately prompted to change the system (UI) password, and the root and tideway (command line) passwords.

Configuring the custom option

If you select the custom option, use the following steps to configure the disks:

Note

These custom install instructions will result in a valid disk layout identical to that created by the install option. The disk configuration utility cannot manage disks if volume groups, encrypted partitions, or a non standard disk configuration are used.

  1. Select INSTALLATION DESTINATION from the INSTALLATION SUMMARY.
  2. If required to encrypt (Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) disk encryption) all partitions (excluding /boot) on the system with a single password, click the Encrypt my data check box. You will enter a password later. To encrypt an additional disk at a later time, see Performing-LUKS-disk-encryption-for-an-added-drive.

  3. Select the disk onto which to install BMC Discovery and click Done. If you had selected Encrypt my data, you will now be prompted for a password. Set the password and click Save password.

    By default LVM is selected, you can use LVM, though if you do, you will be unable to use the Disk Configuration utility after installation. If you do not require LVM, select Standard Partition. You will be unable to use the Disk Configuration utility if any partitions are encrypted. 

  4. Create the partitions in this volume using the sizes described in the following table as a guide.
    1. To add a mount point, click + at the bottom of the installation utility's partition table.
    2. When you enter partition sizes, the default is MB, you must specify GB explicitly.
    3. Click Add mount point to add the mount point.

    4. Change the file system to ext4. 

      Mountpoint

      Type

      Size

      /boot

      ext4

      750 MB

      /

      ext4

      5 GB

      /reserved

      ext4

      5 GB

       

      swap

      Review the Hardware requirements and the Appliance sizing guidelines to size the swap partition

      /var

      ext4

      1.7 GB

      /var/log

      ext4

      1.2 GB

      /var/log/audit

      ext4

      900 MB

      /home

      ext4

      2 GB

      /usr/tideway

      ext4

      Leave the desired capacity field empty to allow the partition to expand to the maximum allowable space.

    5. Click the Encrypt check box if encryption of the individual partition is required. You will be prompted for a password later. 
  5. Click Done. If you selected to encrypt individual partitions, you will now be prompted for a password. Set the password and click Save password.
  6. You are presented with a summary of changes. Review the changes. If they are correct, click Accept Changes.
  7. Click Begin Installation.

 

 

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