How VM Discovery works in ServiceNow

[Suvetha S]

Hi All,

I'm trying to discover few Virtual Machine Instance using Discovery in our instance. I need to work with Platform team to discover those Vms (few are appliances). As per my understandings , Vms can be hosted in a Vcenter or Cloud data center. Will it be fine if i ask them the details of Vcenter(Ip address)  or data center name to discover those Vms? Please advice. 

[Community Alums]

Hi @Suvetha S ,

There are two sides to the discovery here. One is the vCenter discovery that will connect to the vCenter API and collect information about the VMware environment such as ESX servers, resource pools and virtual machine instances. Generalising a little the virtual machine instance is a VMware configuration which could run an operating system and contains a UUID which is a unique identifier.

The other side of discovery here is the "operating system" discovery and in your case when discovery finds the Windows server running extracting information such as os version, cpu, ram, etc. If it's a VMware environment it will match the serial number with the UUID and link the two CIs together.

Discovery identifies and classifies information about virtual machines.

Data collected

Label	Table Name	Field Name
CPUs	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	cpus
Disks	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	disks
Disks size	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	disks_size
Memory	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	memory
Network adapters	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	nics
State	cmdb_ci_vm_instance	state
Image path	cmdb_ci_vmware_instance	image_path
Template	cmdb_ci_vmware_instance	template
vCenter Reference	cmdb_ci_vmware_instance	vcenter_ref
vCenter Reference UUID	cmdb_ci_vmware_instance	vcenter_uuid

Also, read the KB :https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0864549

[Suvetha S]

Hi @Community Alums ,

What is the difference between cmdb_ci_vm_instance & cmdb_ci_vmware_instance records? I'm looking for discovering VMs related to  storage volume. 

[adrian08]

This is an interesting table. Do you happen to have a list of all columns populated per discovery pattern? 

[Harish Bainsla]

Hi @Suvetha S  check below link

https://www.servicenow.com/community/next-experience-articles/servicenow-vcenter-discovery-step-by-s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSFp9VSNdjs

if my answer helps you mark helpful and accept solution