The Stand-Alone VMware Inventory Agent

Discovery and inventory information is a prerequisite to performing license consumption calculations in IT Asset Management. We recommend that you deploy one or more inventory beacons on your network, and use any of the supported inventory collection methods to collect VMware inventory. Each inventory beacon collects discovery and inventory information from the devices within its assigned subnet and sends this information to IT Asset Management. To collect inventory, each inventory beacon requires a network connection to the target VMware vCenter or ESX servers within its assigned subnet.

In secure environments (for example, VMware servers secured by firewalls), you may not be able to establish a network connection between each installed inventory beacon and the VMware servers within its assigned subnet, or you may not be able to install any inventory beacon at all. For such environments, Flexera offers a stand-alone VMware inventory collection agent that can be installed on a Windows server. Although capable of collecting inventory from individual VMware ESX servers, this agent works more efficiently with VMware vCenter servers, where it collects inventory for all VMware ESX servers registered with the target VMware vCenter server. In a clustered environment, the agent can collect VMware inventory for the entire VMware cluster through the target VMware vCenter server. The stand-alone agent saves the collected VMware inventory information (as .ndi files) to a specified location. You will have to export the collected data to IT Asset Management for performing license consumption calculations.

This document describes the installation and operation of the stand-alone VMware inventory agent.