Non-Discoverable Appliance VMs

[Will Young]

We are seeking a best practice or recommendation related to Appliances in the CMDB and ITOM Discovery.

We have a need to track "Appliance" devices in our environment. In this context, an appliance is a virtual machine (server) that is used to deliver services in the infrastructure, but is managed completely by an external vendor so there is no management accessibility for IP-based discovery (nor the ability to install an agent). We are aware of and are managing these appliances in our VMWare environment, and they are being captured in ServiceNow as VM Instances through Discovery. We use Tags in VMWare to identify these objects as appliances, but they are only being created as VM Instances and we would like to be able to manage a CI for these appliances in the same manner as our discoverable servers (using assignment groups, life cycle stages, and etc.)

One approach that we are considering is custom automation related to Discovery. At a high level, we could create a rule that would create a Server CI when a tagged appliance VM is Discovered. We would copy information (such as name) to the Server CI along with setting some applicable default values and connect the VM Instance to the Server with relationships.

Given this high level description of the use case, are there any articles, suggestions, recommendations, or other information that the ServiceNow community can provide to help us identify the best solution?

[Leslie_406]

I have a similar question.  The API populates the cmdb_ci_vm_instance with class = VMware Virtual Machine Instance in the case of a linux server, the discovery pattern identifies the device and adds it to the cmdb_ci_server table, and then populates the cmdb_ci_hardware table for reporting.  

The issue I face is that the virtual appliances are not populating the cmdb_ci_appliance table as I would expect it to and then populate the cmdb_ci_hardware table.

Currently, the virtual appliance has to be manually added to allow for selection as a configuration item in the change management module for scheduling updates.

From the discovery logs, I find the following messages: 

<a title="Could not find any valid credentials to authenticate th...

<a title="Probe skipped due to failure of previous probe attempt

<a title="Unable to establish connection to https://10.251.33.18/...

Is there a location that provides more details to the error messages?