Hi @sethu Raja Jeganathan C​ !

I would recommend to have a look at the Technical Description for Virtual Environments, chapter 2, Server Virtualization:

https://community.flexera.com/s/article/TechnicalDescriptionVirtualEnvironmentsinSnowLicenseManager9

Kind Regards

Pernilla Lindsten

Hi @sethu Raja Jeganathan C​ ,

As @Pernilla Lindsten​ mentioned, the Technical Description documentation for Virtual Environments is a good first stop and reference material for the functionality.

To try and answer your questions:

1) The Snow Windows agent works on Azure VM's and the VDI switch is a setting in the configuration file that simply put flags the inventoried devices as a VDI. This will then be visible in SLM e.g. in Search for Computers in the column 'VDI' that you can add in the Column selector.

2) For non-persistent VDI's, there is a script to be used to let the Agent scan complete and send in the snowpack file before shutting down the VDI. I believe you should be able to request that script when you order the agent with VDI enabled from Snow Support.

The challenging part of your question is the fact that you mention that Hostname will change on these VDI's. Hostname plays an integral part in creating a computer object and tying an inventoried computer to a ClientID (Snow Inventory Database) and a ComputerID (Snow License Manager database). One of the things you risk when using new hostnames all the time are license limit on the Snow Products - they will get eaten up rather quickly, and I'll try to explain why below.

If we take a look at the SI 6 User guide to try and clarify what makes up the identity of a computer (#7.7 Computer Identity – Hostname Only mode feature):

(or https://docs.snowsoftware.com/snow-inventory/en/UUID-7bc7dd6b-08dc-1f2d-eda7-301d8a2dd7c5.html)

In Snow Inventory, an inventoried computer is identified by four properties: its site name,

hostname, BIOS manufacturer and BIOS serial number—concatenated into one property—

and an operating system identification number. If two or more of these properties change,

Snow Inventory will identify the computer as new, and subsequently create another

computer object.

To override the default behavior for identifying computers, configure the HostNameOnly

mode by using the <HostNameOnly> element in the Inventory server configuration file.

The HostNameOnly mode will only identify computers by their hostname and site name

parameters. 

Non-persistent VDI's serial number may change during creation, making it together with the change of hostname two properties that have changed resulting in a new computer object:

• Hostname
• Site name
• Bios Vendor
• Bios Serial
• OS Identifier

And if you would configure HostNameOnly mode - you will get new computer objects created every time the Hostname changes.

Maybe one of our customers has experience from using a similar environment and have experience to share on how they resolved this challenge.

Kind regards,

...Stefan