VM Host - inventory device type

[anhpham1652]

Hello,

Flexera defines Inventory device type is VM Host - A physical virtual host running one or more virtual machines using any virtualization technology, such as VMWare

So VM Host includes both physical and virtual device? Or only physical device? Because I have VM Hosts inventory device with serial number like "VMware-xx xx xx xx xx xx xx xx" and "ABC1234567"

[tjohnson1]

A VM host is the device that hosts the virtual machines. The virtual machines running on the host will have a type of Virtual Machine.

[anhpham1652]

I want to clarity the word VM Host only. VM Host indicates both Physical and Virtual device that host VMs or only Physical?

[ChrisG]

A "VM Host" is generally a type of inventory device record that represents a device that can have virtual machines (VMs) running on it. Normally virtual machines would run under an operating system that is hosted on physical hardware, but I think there may be scenarios where VMs can host other VMs (e.g. Hyper-V running in a VMware virtual machine). I'm not sure how FlexNet Manager Suite/Flexera One ITAM classify a VM that can host other VMs in that kind of scenario.

[anhpham1652]

Do you mean that Inventory device type - VM Host can be both physical and virtual device?

[ChrisG]

No, I don't mean that. The "type" field is a single value and cannot have multiple values.

I'm meaning that I don't know for sure what value this field will have for an inventory device that is both (a) a virtualized operating system instance; and (b) that virtualized operating system instance is able to host other virtual machines.

[JJacildo]

Hello, I believe this depends on your enterprise for example VMWare supports the vCenter Server to be installed in both physical or virtual machines.

Not 100% sure here but in FNMS, it identifies the device where that software is installed as the VMHost and matches the UUID of the host to incorporate the VMs in it.

I hope that helps.

[anhpham1652]

The problem is that I need to make a list of physic devices. I don't know if VM Host in All Inventory belongs to this list? Or I have to base on another properties to decide such as Serial Number, etc.,?

[kclausen]

It you go to the Active Inventory view and filter on Inventory Device Type = "Computer" or "VM Host".  This will eliminate your virtual machines.  

[anhpham1652]

And what does it mean by "a physical virtual device" here?

[kclausen]

The exact wording in the highlighted text is "physical virtual host".  A virtual host such as VMWare ESX, Hyper-V or KVM) is normally a bare metal server with some type of hypervisor capability where it is managing multiple virtual machines.

There can be exceptions to the above.  For example, an Azure Instance (which is a virtual machine) could be running Windows Server Data Center with Hyper-V enabled and managing virtual machines under it.

[jjoaquin]

Just to ask you guys because this has been a talk on our side as well, seems like there's confusion now between computer and VM Host considering that most computers if HyperV is enabled, are tagged as VMHost, is that even correct? If not, what difference would it make if we change tagging from VM Host to computer instead? To be honest, up until now the only clear example to me of a VM host is a server that can host a virtual machine regardless of the platform. But since even simple workstation has the capability of doing this, they are then being tagged as VMHost instead of just computer.

[ChrisG]

Yes, Windows computers with Hyper-V enabled have the potential to host virtual machines, and so will have a type of "VM Host" (at least if inventory is gathered using the FlexNet inventory agent).

You can't assume that an inventory device record with a type of "VM Host" is some sort of server that hosts VMs running server-style workloads. That may be the case, but as you've noted it is common these days for end-user computers to have Hyper-V enabled and so be able to host VMs too.

Of course from a raw inventory perspective it is hard to tell the difference: these are just Windows computers with Hyper-V. Whether a computer hosts a server workload or is an end-user device is a question of how the device is used, but there's no definitive way to identify that from automatically gathered inventory.