Windows Hosts

To discover Windows hosts, BMC Helix Discovery uses one or more BMC Discovery Outposts.

BMC Discovery Outpost

Information about your organization's hardware and software is obtained by BMC Discovery Outpost. The Outpost is an 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 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). 

The BMC Discovery Outpost performs ssh discovery using an API rather than an ssh client. Consequently, alternative ssh clients are not supported on the BMC Discovery Outpost. 

The BMC Discovery Outpost is FIPS compliant. 

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. The BMC Discovery Outpost can also communicate with the BMC Helix Discovery service through HTTP(S) proxies; that is, web proxies that adhere to the HTTP protocol specification. We test using the Squid proxy, but any web proxies that adhere to the HTTP protocol specification should be suitable.

The Outpost is 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.