Hi Sanket,
Adding the details for your question
1. I have a vCenter instance available in the CMDB, how can I figure out which Windows machine has a particular instance of vCenter installed on it, so that I can run a discovery on that particular machine and get the details of all the datacenters, clusters, ESX Servers and VM instances.
You can go to the vcenter table to see more details about the host and which version of vcenter is installed.
Clicking on the 'server' from [L1] relationship takes you to the actual computer/server record.
Also, I found out that VMWare has a vCenter web app also. So how to figure out whether the vCenter is istalled on a Windows machine or was discovered from web app?
VMware discovery runs only when below ports are open
2.I see even in Orlando release, ServiceNow uses a probe for vCenter discovery and there is no pattern available.How can I get all the information that is available for VM instances in the probe and will it be wise to customize this OOTB probe keeping in mind the automatic upgrade of probes from ServiceNow.
There is no support for vCenter patterns till Paris. You can customise the OOTB pobe to fetch additional details.
To customize VM instances, you can use VMWarevCenterVMsProbe to get info from vcenter and respective sensor to perist the same in the CMDB.
3. How can I fetch additional details about a VM instance which already is not available OOTB.
You have to update VMWarevCenterVMsProbe and VCenterVMsSensor.
Follow below steps
a. Add a field in cmdb_ci_vmware_instance or any other parent table in the hierarchy.
b. Update the probe to fetch the detail needed.
eg:- host_name is not fetched currently as OOTB. Add host_name to the datamap as below.
c. Update vm object to push the host_name field. This vm object will be used by sensor to persist into cmdb. This field_name should match with the name in cmdb that created newly. The field name is 'fqdn' here.
d. Update VCenterVMsSensor sensor to persist the new field through discovery.
This change is needed only when the field name mapped in vm object is not similar as the field name in the cmdb table.
update fixupVM method to map the probe value to the cmdb table field value
We can sync-up if you have more questions.
Thank you, Valarmathi for your detailed response.
Currently, many of vCenter relationships show no host value as I feel they are not hosted on any server but on a VM instance.
But, I figure out the host using the ip in the name or the url.
- The only confusion which I am having now is, whenever I run a discovery on the host linux server with the ip address, it always discovers the vcenter, which is OK, but how can I discover the updated values in Linux, becoz now in this host linux server all the related lists are blank, as discovery is not running the linux server probes only vmware probe.
- Also, if I want to write a discovery schedule for all the vcenters (don't want to use vCenter event collector), will I have to use the IP addresses in the schedules?
Regards,
Sanket
