How important for your business to know virtual machines that are not inventoried

[AamerSharif]

All,

Virtualisation environment is so common and expanding everyday, changes frequently, new virtual machines added, old deprecated/removed everyday.

How important for you/your business to know inventory gap of virtual machines that are running/managed by e.g. VMWare ESXi, Microsoft HyperV, OVM Server hypervisors but not getting inventoried due to any reasons, let say inventory agent/tool is not installed yet. 

Your feedback is important in prioritisation of virtual machine inventory gap transparency. It will be very nice if you can give me feedback. 

You can reply to the post OR simply like the post to get an idea.

Thanks for your help.

Aamer

[adrian_ritz1]

Hi @AamerSharif 

That's a great idea, now we have an report in inventory where we can see alerts for VM's which don't have a host, this is good for troubleshooting as we can investigate on which hosts they are running and why the host are not audited.

But would be nice to have also a report other way around, like you have the vCenter, or other virtualization option, all hosts and all VM, and also the status for VM if agent is running or not on VM, in this way you can spot the gaps in infrastructure and audit the missing servers.

[JeffVoss]

And it could possibly used to help manage the licensing of appliances if done well. 

[mfranz]

Hi,

Filling in the voids is an important process for most of our customers.

I guess this goes into a direction FNMS used to work in the past, when "placeholder inventories" got created from virtualization data when an actual virtual machine inventory was missing?

And please don't forget KVM.

Best regards,

Markward

[AamerSharif]

Providing transparency to VM inventory that will help to understand inventory virtual machine inventory gap.

Idea is to keep All inventory page specific to inventoried device as it we have today but highlight the VM's that exist on the reported virtual host's but never reported inventory (common case inventory agent is not installed) through a new report.

[MurrayPeters]

Hi Aamer,

Very happy to see this being discussed and hopefully added to the product as it comes up with every project I do.  It's critical that the customer be made aware of the compliance risk related to VM's that aren't reporting inventory as it represents a gap in coverage.  FNMS has the data, but without having access to the DB to run queries it's impossible to report on those gaps.

I'm not sure I follow where you are suggesting you might add the views of these VM's.    Whilst it might be useful to see them when you look at a host record and see the VM's residing on it (highlighting which VM's do/don't have full inventory) it will be important that we can export the full list of hosts/vm's in one report so the customer can review/action as needed.

thanks,
Murray

[AamerSharif]

Thanks Murray for sharing the use case and feedback, Yes and also to include vCenter/Cluster information if available. I will share the report design with you all as soon as i have collected enough data to make decision.

Cheers,
Aamer

[winvarma]

Hi @AamerSharif ,

For few publishers like IBM and oracle, we may have a complex licensing and the data related to hardware cores and processors is also important for calculating the consumption and if the VM host inventory is not available on which these products are being installed and used then we will not be able to get a compliance position and i'm facing this issue where in due to restrictions not getting the complete VM inventory/host inventory and unable to bridge the gap.

May be the documentation from Flexera should be educating all the product users the importance of each inventory is also captured(more in detailed in addition to what we currently have ) and available for customers so that the implementers will not have to do any further research on answering the kind of questions which may be raised by the customers. May be its a bit off topic but right platform for expressing.

Regards,

Winvarma