VMware connectivity from Beacon for virtualized inventory
Discovery and inventory information are necessary for Flexera One ITAM and FlexNet Manager Suite to perform license consumption calculations. For collecting inventory, we recommend that you deploy one or more inventory beacons on your network and use supported inventory collection methods. Each inventory beacon deployed collects discovery and inventory information from the devices within its assigned subnet and sends this information to FlexNet Manager Suite.
To collect VMware inventory, inventory beacons require a network connection to the target VMware vCenter or ESX servers within its assigned subnet. In order to do this, a direct connection to the VMware environment, from the Flexera Beacon is supported.
In some highly secure environment, it may be necessary to define the URL that the beacon will connect to. In previous versions of Flexera ITAM, it has been documented that the URL is the ‘SDK’ for VMware. This is no longer the case.
Changes in the VMware URL (for testing connectivity)
The beacon supports discovery and then inventory of VMware via a process of connecting to the VMware API’s from the beacon server. This requires:
1 – Read-only credentials to the VMware environment
2 – A discovery and inventory rule for the beacon to execute.
Both of these are documented in Flexera documentation. In previous versions, the documentation indicated that connection to:
https://<vcenter-server>/sdk
was the supported approach. Whilst correct at the time, VMware changes after v5.x have led to a different URL being presented. This is:
https://<vcenter-server>/mob or https://<vcenter-server/sdk/vim.wsdl
If connectivity needs to be tested from the beacon, both of the above URL’s can be entered into a browser and connectivity should be established. This should look something like:
API Calls for VMware Inventory Collection
The stand-alone VMware inventory agent connects to the VMware SDK URL (https://<servername>/mob) on each target VMware server. This connection requires an account with read access to the SDK URL.
The agent makes the following API calls through the SDK once a connection is established with the target VMware server:
|
API name |
Description |
|
GetServiceContent |
A single call is made to this API to retrieve the ServiceInstance to enable further queries. |
|
RetrieveProperties: Host Information |
A single call is made against the root folder to return information about each host server with the following attributes:
|
|
RetrieveProperties: VM Information |
A call is made against each returned HostSystem to obtain the following attributes for each virtual machine that exists on the host:
|
