Summary

Synopsis

Discover has been enhanced in the October 2012 Sequence to discover VMware ESX Servers through VMware vCenter.

Discussion

A new credential called "VMware vCenter" has been added in BDNA Credentials UI to provide credential for VMware vCenter. The user needs to provide Windows credential to discover VMware vCenter on Windows and then Discover will use the given VMware vCenter credential to discover VMware ESX managed by the vCenter.

There are several discovery scenarios to consider with this new feature:

1. Discover ESX by scanning VMware vCenter:
   In this scan you will discover the vCenter application and all the ESX host/s managed by this vCenter. ESX hosts managed by the vCenter can be found in a new report under Analytics -> Virtualization -> VMware vCenter Managed ESX Operating Systems.
   
   This report will list all the ESX managed by the vCenter and basic ESX host information along with # of guests configured and running on that ESX host. The vCenter host can be deduced from vCenter Hostname column in this report.
   
   It should be noted that these ESX hosts/OS are not scanned by BDNA, hence they will not fall under BDNA OS hierarchy and will not be available under OS report. Instead they will be discovered by scanning vCenter application and hence will be available only in this new report.
2. Discover ESX by scanning ESX host:
   This is the ESX scanning using existing feature for ESX discovery.
3. Discover ESX by scanning both vCenter and ESX host itself:
   In this scan you should see the ESX OS get populated under BDNA OS report and you should also see a row in above listed 'VMware vCenter Managed ESX Operating Systems' report as the ESX is also discovered by vCenter discovery.