Categorizing the clients

Before you begin

When you categorize the clients, you assign to the clients non-default metrics for each selected product, from the licensed ones.

The result of this operation is the value of the following client setting:

_BESClient_LicenseType_productname

About this task

Based on the client operating system, the default metric for the products is rigidly determined.

The following table displays this mapping:

Table 1. Mapping between the client platform and the product default metric
OS type OS name example Default metric
Supported UNIX Solaris, HP-UX, AIX RVU
Supported Linux SLES, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Centos RVU
Supported Microsoft Windows Server Windows 2008, Windows 2012 RVU
Supported Microsoft Windows non-Server Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10 ClientDevice
Supported Mac OS X Leopard, Lion, Yosemite ClientDevice, unless the operating system name allows to clearly distinguish if it is a MAC server. In this case, the default metric is RVU.

For example, if the client is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the default metric for all its products is RVU.

The administrator can override the default metric for one or more products.

The possible values for all of the metric are: RVU, MVS, ClientDevice.

To set the metric to RVU, MVS, or ClientDevice, the administrator runs the Fixlet Categorize RVU Clients, Categorize MVS Clients, or Categorize ClientDevice Clients.

To categorize the clients, you must complete these steps from the BigFix console:
  1. Go to Sites > External Sites > BES Support.
  2. Select Fixlets and Tasks.
  3. Depending on your needs, select in the Fixlets and Tasks pane:
    • Categorize ClientDevice clients to override the default license type of selected products to ClientDevice.
    • Categorize MVS clients to override the default license type of selected products to MVS.
    • Categorize RVU clients to override the default license type of selected products to RVU.
Example, to override to MVS the license type used by the products:
  • Compliance_Payment_Card_Industry_Add-on
  • Patch

See the following panel.

Figure 1. Categorize MVS clients
Categorize clients