- Owner: Nicolas Rousseau
- Owner Email Address: nrousseau@flexera.com
- Solution Type: Custom Inventory Connector
- Flexera Product & Version: FNMS 2021+
- Environment: On Prem and Cloud
- Development Effort (Days): 2
- Implementation Effort (Days): 0.1
- Disclaimer:
SOLUTIONS ARE PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" BASIS. NEITHER FLEXERA NOR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE ANY WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, TITLE, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OR NONINFRINGEMENT. LICENSEE MAY HAVE OTHER STATUTORY RIGHTS. HOWEVER, TO THE FULL EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE DURATION OF STATUTORILY REQUIRED WARRANTIES, IF ANY, WILL BE LIMITED TO THE SHORTER OF (I) THE STATUTORILY REQUIRED PERIOD OR (II) THIRTY (30) DAYS FROM LICENSEE’S ACCEPTANCE OF THE AGREEMENT.
Goal of the document and audience
This document gives the details for collecting data from Nutanix or Red Hat RHEV cluster and integrating the data into FNMS / Flexera One ITAM
- Create or update clusters
- Create or update Hosts
- Link VMs to Hosts and Host to clusters
The integration also creates Virtual Machines that would not be inventoried but assumes the full inventory is coming from an inventory tool (FNMS agent, SCCM) that include applications inventory. This creation is native in the Spreadsheet adapter design, you can choose to ignore the VMs that have no detailed inventory…
The approach is to read the data in the Cluster Management source (Nutanix Prims / Cluster REST APIs or RHEV mySQL database) and generate the files (Cluster.csv, Compuiter.csv, used as a pivot format) that will be located in the folder that a specific Inventory Spreadsheet Adapter, created from the Beacon UI will read.
The solution works for both on premise and cloud instances.
The spreadsheet adapter expects each column of the templates to exist in the file that will be consumed, but does not require all files of the templates (file evidence, installer evidences etc.) to be present. This, the two integrations below provide the minimum number of files (computers and clusters) but all the columns (very often empty) in the spreadsheet. Note that these are the 2021R1 templates and that an implementation in a future version of FNMS may require to re-align the queries selections with the current template.
To be noted the ComputerID or HostComputerID can be stings in ImportedComputer. The UUID for the sources have been used in these two integrations, in the absence on database ID (integer or bingint).
The read operation will be typically scheduled (from the Windows Scheduler) once a day at 3:00 PM, the Beacon Spreadsheet adapter will be scheduled at 5:00 PM (before the Inventory import and reconcile task that runs once a day typically at 10:00 PM or 00:00.
Prerequisites
There are prerequisites that need to be applied in the two integrations
- The read operations require the right levels of credentials in the source applications (MySQL db or Nutanix Prism / Nutanix clusters).
- For Nutanix, the user running the PowerShell must have the rights to query the Prism AND the clusters.
- The ports between the beacons that will host the PowerShell script and the Spreadsheet inventory adapter and the data sources need to be opened
There are ways to encrypt password in PowerShell, please refer to a PowerShell expert to do this.
Detailed code and steps
- Each reader will need to be executed from a PowerShell (RHEV to be finalized), in the context of a user with the rights on the data sources
- Nutanix PowerShell Sample (code is in attached Word document)
- SQL Query For RHEV (PowerShell to be finalized) (code is in attached Word document)
- The output computer.csv and cluster.csv files are specified in the PowerShell scripts: for instance: C:/Flexera/Integrations/Nutanix/Data
- You need to create a Spreadsheet Adapter for each integration on the Beacon UI
- Format: csv coma separated with headers. Make sure the Connection folder is the output file folder for the PowerShell script.
- Schedule the PowerShell scripts (Daily if you want to have refreshed movements of VMs in Hosts (can be useful for the 90 peak in Windows Server License consumption) with the Windows Task scheduler
- Schedule the Beacon Spreadsheet adapters with the Beacon scheduler
