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Collection of Inventory from VMware ESX Servers

CA ITCM provides two ways to collect inventory from VMware ESX servers.

• The first method is to install an asset management agent on the VMware ESX service console.

  For VMware ESX 3.5, the special VMware ESX agent on the supplemental CD must be installed.

  For VMware ESX 4.0, the Release 12.8 agent may be installed.

  This agent will collect the properties of the VMware service console. The disk, memory, and other system properties that are collected will describe the state of the VMware service console and its allocated resources. Note that this will be a small subset of the whole machine’s resources. For backwards compatibility, this agent will report the inventory using the host name reported by the VMware service console.

• The second method is to install and configure the asset management Remote Virtualization Inventory add-on to the asset management agent, a new feature in CA ITCM Release 12.8, which will collect the properties of the whole computer. The disk, memory, and other system properties reported by this agent will describe the state of the whole computer’s hardware. In order to distinguish this inventory from the data returned by an agent that might have been installed on the VMware service console, this agent will report the inventory using the service console’s host name prefixed with “VMware ESX – ”.

If both methods of inventory collection for the same computer are used, the DSM Explorer will show the relationship between the inventory collected for the VMware service console and for the entire machine by using the Related Computers pane.