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Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
Managing VM managers
VM managers are pieces of software that create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. You configure connections to VM managers so that BigFix Inventory can gather data that is required to calculate utilization of license metrics in virtual environments.
Supported virtualization types
BigFix Inventory requires that connections to VM managers are defined for the following virtualization types: Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Xen.
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
Verifying permissions for VMware communication
Users must have sufficient privileges to collect all the data from the VM managers for VMware. The user must have at least read-only rights to all VMs on which the agents are running.

Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
- Computer statuses
  Computer statuses provide information about the condition of the computers that are monitored by BigFix Inventory. To properly discover the installed software and measure its license metric utilization, ensure that computers in your environment work correctly.
- Managing VM managers
  VM managers are pieces of software that create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. You configure connections to VM managers so that BigFix Inventory can gather data that is required to calculate utilization of license metrics in virtual environments.
  - Default PVU counting on x86 processors
    To properly calculate PVU subcapacity, BigFix Inventory requires information about the number of processor cores that are available to virtual machines and on the physical computers that host these machines. If the information is not available, license metric utilization cannot be properly calculated and reported results might be over-counted for x86 processors.
  - Supported virtualization types
    BigFix Inventory requires that connections to VM managers are defined for the following virtualization types: Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, and Xen.
    - VMware vSphere
      VMware vSphere is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
      - Verifying permissions for VMware communication
        Users must have sufficient privileges to collect all the data from the VM managers for VMware. The user must have at least read-only rights to all VMs on which the agents are running.
    - Microsoft™ Hyper-V
      Microsoft™ Hyper-V is one of the virtualization technologies that are supported by BigFix Inventory. It is the successor of Microsoft Virtual Server.
    - Kernel-based Virtual Machine
      Kernel-based Virtual Machine is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - Nutanix
      Available from 9.2.17. Nutanix is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
    - <deprecated> Oracle VM Server for x86
      Available from 9.2.14.Oracle VM Server for x86 is one of the virtualization technologies supported by BigFix Inventory.
  - Flow of capacity data from VM managers
    To understand how capacity data is gathered in virtual environments, see what data flows between virtual machines, VM Manager tool, and the BigFix Inventory server, and how frequently it is transferred.
  - Basic VM management (central)
    Use basic VM management if the BigFix server can connect to VM managers in your infrastructure. It is the default method of configuring connections to VM managers through the BigFix Inventory user interface.
  - Advanced VM management (distributed)
    Use advanced VM management if the BigFix server cannot connect to some of the VM managers because they are in separated networks. This approach requires that you install an additional VM Manager Tool, and configure VM managers through the command line.
  - Collecting capacity data from virtualization hosts for Xen and KVM
    For Citrix, Xen and KVM, connection to the VM manager does not have to be defined in BigFix Inventory to collect capacity data. The data can be collected directly from virtualization hosts by using the Run Capacity Scan on Virtualization Hosts task.
  - Maintenance tasks
    You can perform additional maintenance and troubleshooting tasks on VM Manager Tool. These tasks are not limited to a specific approach to VM management, but can be applied to any instance of VM Manager Tool.
  - Best practices for configuring VM managers
    Apply the best practices when configuring VM managers to ensure that your infrastructure works efficiently.
- Administering the server
  Perform administering tasks on your server to configure advanced settings, or restart its services.
- Administering the database
  Perform administering tasks on your database to keep it in good condition, protect your data, or configure additional settings.
- Removing inactive computers
  When you decommission a computer in your infrastructure, it continues to report to BigFix Inventory. The data is still collected from this computer, and displayed on the metric reports. To ensure that all infrastructure changes are reflected in BigFix Inventory, you should remove each decommissioned computer from BigFix. If you cannot remove this computer from BigFix for a valid reason, you can use an alternative solution, and decommission the computer in BigFix Inventory.
- Managing data sources
  Computers in an organization can be divided into organizational units, and can be monitored by multiple BigFix infrastructures. Each infrastructure is referred to as a data source. Data from multiple data sources can be imported to one instance of BigFix Inventory.

Verifying permissions for VMware communication

Users must have sufficient privileges to collect all the data from the VM managers for VMware. The user must have at least read-only rights to all VMs on which the agents are running.

Before you begin

You can verify whether users have sufficient privileges in the VMware Infrastructure Client. The user must have the correct access privileges for VMs on which the endpoints are running, and for the hosts of the VMs. If a user has insufficient privileges, agents return a No VM Manager Data status.

To collect the data required for an Oracle audit from the VMware VM manager (vCenter or ESXi), the user account in the vCenter or ESXi must have read permission for all elements in the virtualization hierarchy. For more information on configuring VM Managers for collecting Oracle auditing data, refer to Configuring VM Managers.

This procedure describes how to enable read-only rights for all elements in a virtual topology. Read-access is required only to the VMs on which the endpoints are running and to hosts of these VMs. However, the easiest way to set access permissions is to configure read-only access for all elements in a virtual topology.

Procedure

To extend the privileges for the user, log in to VMware Infrastructure Client with a user that has administrator rights.
Right-click on the left bar and choose Hosts and Clusters.
Go to Permissions tab, right-click anywhere in the section, and then click Add Permission.
In the Assign Permissions panel, click Add, choose the user, and then click OK.
Choose Read-Only as an Assigned Role.
Select the Propagate to Child Objects check box, and click OK.