Welcome
Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
Managing VM managers
VM managers are pieces of software that create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. You configure connections to VM managers so that BigFix Inventory can gather data that is required to calculate utilization of license metrics in virtual environments.
Supported virtualization types
BigFix Inventory requires that connections to VM managers are defined for the following virtualization types: Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Xen.
Kernel-based Virtual Machine
Kernel-based Virtual Machine is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.

BigFix Documentation Homepage
BigFix 11 Inventory Documentation
Welcome to the BigFix Inventory documentation, where you can find information about how to install and configure BigFix Inventory. The application provides you with information about your inventory and license metrics. You can manage your software assets, gather information about your hardware, and ensure license compliance for your enterprise using BigFix Inventory.
BigFix Platform
Overview
Become familiar with key concepts that are necessary to understand how BigFix Inventory works and learn about features and functions that are introduced in every version of the application.
Installing
Learn about the requirements and available installation scenarios to ensure that the deployment of BigFix Inventory goes smoothly in your environment.
Configuring
After you install BigFix Inventory, configure the application. Create accounts for the users who need access to the application and set up scans to collect software and hardware inventory data from your environment.
Upgrading
A new version of BigFix Inventory is released periodically, typically at the end of each calendar quarter. Upgrade to the new version regularly to take full advantage of new features and application fixes.
Catalog Overview
This section provides information about catalog updates available with every release.
Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
- Computer statuses
  Computer statuses provide information about the condition of the computers that are monitored by BigFix Inventory. To properly discover the installed software and measure its license metric utilization, ensure that computers in your environment work correctly.
- Managing VM managers
  VM managers are pieces of software that create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. You configure connections to VM managers so that BigFix Inventory can gather data that is required to calculate utilization of license metrics in virtual environments.
  - Default PVU counting on x86 processors
    To properly calculate PVU subcapacity, BigFix Inventory requires information about the number of processor cores that are available to virtual machines and on the physical computers that host these machines. If the information is not available, license metric utilization cannot be properly calculated and reported results might be over-counted for x86 processors.
  - Supported virtualization types
    BigFix Inventory requires that connections to VM managers are defined for the following virtualization types: Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Xen.
    - VMware vSphere
      VMware vSphere is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - Microsoft™ Hyper-V
      Microsoft™ Hyper-V is one of the virtualization technologies that are supported by BigFix Inventory. It is the successor of Microsoft Virtual Server.
    - Kernel-based Virtual Machine
      Kernel-based Virtual Machine is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - Nutanix
      Available from 9.2.17. Nutanix is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - <deprecated> Oracle VM Server for x86
      Available from 9.2.14.Oracle VM Server for x86 is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
  - Flow of capacity data from VM managers
    To understand how capacity data is gathered in virtual environments, see what data flows between virtual machines, VM Manager tool, and the BigFix Inventory server, and how frequently it is transferred.
  - Basic VM management (central)
    Use basic VM management if the BigFix server can connect to VM managers in your infrastructure. It is the default method of configuring connections to VM managers through the BigFix Inventory user interface.
  - Advanced VM management (distributed)
    Use advanced VM management if the BigFix server cannot connect to some of the VM managers because they are in separated networks. This approach requires that you install an additional VM Manager Tool, and configure VM managers through the command line.
  - Collecting capacity data from virtualization hosts for Xen and KVM
    For Citrix, Xen and KVM, connection to the VM manager does not have to be defined in BigFix Inventory to collect capacity data. The data can be collected directly from virtualization hosts by using the Run Capacity Scan on Virtualization Hosts task.
  - Maintenance tasks
    You can perform additional maintenance and troubleshooting tasks on VM Manager Tool. These tasks are not limited to a specific approach to VM management, but can be applied to any instance of VM Manager Tool.
  - Best practices for configuring VM managers
    Apply the best practices when configuring VM managers to ensure that your infrastructure works efficiently.
- Administering the server
  Perform administering tasks on your server to configure advanced settings, or restart its services.
- Administering the database
  Perform administering tasks on your database to keep it in good condition, protect your data, or configure additional settings.
- Removing inactive computers
  When you decommission a computer in your infrastructure, it continues to report to BigFix Inventory. The data is still collected from this computer, and displayed on the metric reports. To ensure that all infrastructure changes are reflected in BigFix Inventory, you should remove each decommissioned computer from BigFix. If you cannot remove this computer from BigFix for a valid reason, you can use an alternative solution, and decommission the computer in BigFix Inventory.
- Managing data sources
  Computers in an organization can be divided into organizational units, and can be monitored by multiple BigFix infrastructures. Each infrastructure is referred to as a data source. Data from multiple data sources can be imported to one instance of BigFix Inventory.
Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
Managing security threats
Learn how to use BigFix Inventory to manage security threats in your environment. You can view whether any of the installed components is prone to any Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE).
Tutorials
Tutorials help you understand how to use BigFix Inventory. They consist of modules that focus on broad goals. Modules consist of tasks that show how to configure specific settings step-by-step.
Security
Configure different security features to adequately protect business assets and resources in the data model when using BigFix Inventory.
Troubleshooting and support
Learn about solutions to common problems that might arise when you use BigFix Inventory BigFix Inventory and how to find logs and trace files that help you troubleshoot those problems.
Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
Integrating with REST API
External systems integration is one of the key features of BigFix Inventory. Business logic is enabled for integration and interfaces are provided for common integration points.
Glossary
Guide in PDF format

Kernel-based Virtual Machine

Kernel-based Virtual Machine is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.

Purpose

Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a full virtualization solution for Linux^®. In the KVM architecture, each guest (virtual machine) is implemented as a regular Linux process. After you install KVM, you can run multiple guests, with each of them running a different operating system image. Each of these virtual machines has private, virtualized hardware, which includes memory, storage, graphics adapter, and a network card. This allows KVM to benefit from all the features of the Linux kernel.

Collecting capacity data

Capacity data is collected from virtual machines that are managed by KVM hosts in two ways:

Capacity data from x86 KVM hosts that are controlled by RHV-M is collected by the VM Manager Tool.
Capacity data from x86 KVM hosts that are not controlled by RHV-M and from PowerKVM hosts is collected directly from the host by using the Run Capacity Scan on Virtualization Hosts fixlet. For more information, see: Collecting capacity data directly from KVM hosts.

Red Hat Virtualization Manager (RHV-M)

Red Hat Virtualization (RHV, previously known as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization) is an enterprise virtualization product based on the KVM hypervisor. RHV-M is a service running on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server that provides interfaces for controlling the virtualization platform. It manages provisioning, connection protocols, user sessions logins and logoffs, virtual desktop pools, virtual machine images, and the high availability and clustering systems. RHV-M provides the REST API that is used by BigFix Inventory to collect information about the whole infrastructure that is managed by RHV-M.

The default URL that is to be used:

https://<RHV-M_IP_address>/ovirt-engine/api

Supported versions:

For a full list of supported versions, see: Supported virtualization types.

Diagram showing the communication between the server and RHV-M