VMWare Vcenter Discovery or PowerCLI

smouazzen · ‎03-27-2023

Hi All,

I am very new to ServicenNow and we are trying to compare VMWare Discovery to a PowerCLI script to fetch all the CI data from our Vcenter implementation. Basically we need to understand the licenses impact by using Discover vs. PowerCLI. Here are some questions to starte with. I appreciate adding any other aspects to connsider:

1. Does PowerCLI update existing database records created using IP discovery? Or does it create new database records?

2. How does creating CIs using PowerCLI script impact our license count?

3. What is the difference between VMWare Discovery and PowerCLI when it comes to completeness of data? Meaning does one tool provide more details than the other?

Thank you in advance.

David104 · ‎03-28-2023

OK, so if you are using OOTB vCenter discvorey, it will discover the VMWare VM's as Virtual Machine Instances. These VMI's get related to the associated Server CI's, so you will see two records for kind of the same entity - but they are slightly different. It sounds like you have already discovered the Server records for some of these and last I heard, the licenses model counts either the VMI or the server but not both - so if you have already discovered the Server record, then the VMI should not consume any further SU count. Of course, that assumes that the relationship between the records has been discovered, which will happen if you are using OOTB discovery on these.

If you want to use PowerCLI to create your own integration, you will have to make sure to create the correct recods on the correct classes etc. In order to maximise the chance of updating rather than creating new records, you would want to use Robust Transform to leverage IRE - pretty much how the Service Graph connectors work.

vCenter discovery works pretty well OOTB, so I'd recommend sticking with that. If you do find that you are getting duplicate records, you might jsut need to look at the identification rules on the relevant classes to see if you can match them up in a different way.

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smouazzen · ‎03-29-2023

Thank you @David104, that was helpful.

David104 · ‎03-29-2023

Glad I could help!