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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.
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.

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 BigFix Inventory 9.2.17. Nutanix is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - 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.

Oracle VM Server for x86

9.2.14 Available from 9.2.14.Oracle VM Server for x86 is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.

Purpose

Oracle VM Server for x86 is a full virtualization solution that manages the Oracle VM environment. BigFix Inventory supports the Oracle VM Servers for x86 which are managed by Oracle VM Managers. BigFix Inventory connects to Oracle VM Manager and collects the software and capacity data. The solution does not support the direct connection to the Oracle VM Server for x86.

Important: The Oracle VM Manager to which BigFix Inventory connects can manage both Oracle VM Servers for x86 and SPARC. However, this solution does not retrieve the data from SPARC Servers. Oracle VM Server for SPARC is supported by BigFix Inventory on different terms. For more information, see: Client Installation on Oracle Solaris.

Oracle VM Manager

Oracle VM Manager 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. Oracle VM Manager provides the REST API that is used by BigFix Inventory to collect information about the infrastructure that is managed by Oracle VM Manager.

The default URL that is to be used:

https://<OVM-Manager_IP_address>:7002/ovm/core/wsapi/rest

Supported versions:

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

Diagram showing the communication between the server and Oracle VM Manager