Virtual Devices

FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R1 (On-Premises Edition)
The Virtual Devices menu under Discovery & Inventory contains features related to the virtual and remote devices that are either in your network, or hosted by a cloud service provider. The discovery and inventory collection process can discover virtual infrastructure and collect hardware and software inventory from the virtualized infrastructure, based on the following principles:
  • For Hyper-V, a cluster hierarchy is detected and recorded automatically.
  • For VMware and Oracle VM cluster hierarchies, the appropriate inventory beacon(s) have to be configured.
  • Citrix XenDesktop inventory also requires configuration of an inventory beacon.
  • Naturally, collecting inventory data from a cloud service provider also requires that you have configured a connection on an inventory beacon (see Managing AWS EC2 Connections).
  • For servers located on-premises, VM hosts are detected for the hosted virtual machines, and the corresponding records (with relationships) are created. In contrast, if the virtual machine is an instance hosted by a cloud service provider (such as AWS), the host name may not be available (and is generally not relevant).
  • For partitioned hardware on-premises, the hardware layers (managed as hosts), as well as hardware partitions (managed as virtual machines), are detected, and the corresponding records (with relationships) are created.

FlexNet Manager Suite discovery and inventory collection works on virtual devices in the same way as it works on physical devices. A virtual machine is treated as an independent computer and the discovery and inventory process runs on each of the target virtual machines independently. This means that, if you want detailed inventory collected from a virtual machine (or instance) hosted by a cloud service provider such as AWS, you need to arrange for the FlexNet inventory agent to be included in the image from which the virtual machine is instantiated.

For example, consider a use case when a VMware server hosts five virtual machines, each of which has an Oracle Database installed. You install the FlexNet inventory agent on each of the virtual machines and on the host as well. FlexNet Manager Suite will get the software and hardware inventory, with Oracle inventory from all six machines (five virtual machines and a host). If you choose not to install the FlexNet inventory agent, you will have to configure a discovery and inventory rule to collect inventory from all six machines.

This menu has the following pages: