After much feedback we have decided to enable a very commonly requested feature.
Alas, Live Optics Server/Virtualization Inventory Mode (Phase 1, anyway!)
Inventory mode will allow you use the standard Windows-based Live Optics - Optical Prime collector to connect to the usual Windows, Linux, VMware (including VSAN appliances), Hyper-V, other Hypervisors, Solaris, and HP-UX to simply Inventory Servers and Virtual Machines.
All the data will be written locally to Microsoft Excel and NO data will be transmitted…period.
Why?
While the online features of Live Optics Server/Virtualization profiling are rich with data points and performance graphs, sometimes we just need less data.
What? Less data??!! I know, I know, that is what I said, too. However, now I am sold on it. Sold and actually pretty excited about the opportunities that taking the product in this direction will bring.
Use Case #1
Federal Governments, Military/Defense organizations or even some enterprise accounts (like banks) will often not feel they can participate in the online program due to legal, stringent policy, or lack of any connectivity (totally dark sites).
However, they are still very interested in knowing what they have.
This last point still baffles me. Countless times I have been on the phone with large organizations who simply have no idea what they have bought over the years. So, if you feel like that is describing you, but you didn’t know if you were the odd ball out, you are not. It happens all the time. Ironically, the bigger the organization, the more often it happens, even though you would think those are the places with all the resources and automation. Information gaps have and will always continue to exist. You are not alone.
Use Case #2
Data Protection Administrators don’t care about run rate server performance but do care about what capacities are being protected, or if a machine isn’t being protected at all!
Most Data Protection Products license by the protected capacity. Problem is that Backup Software products often can’t see inside the VMs they are protecting and eliminating being billed for whitespace can be hard to prove.
Licensing True-Ups can be hard to understand for similar reasons and often the value for Protected Capacities are issued by the Data Protection product itself (with some behind-the-scenes calculations which are not made public to consumers of the product). That means Backup Admins often can’t formulate their own opinions.
Sometimes, all you want is to add up the server capacity and get a total. We heard you. We get it and you now you got it.
Summary
Of course, it’s still platform- and hardware-agnostic. So, any vendor hardware, including the Cloud, will work just fine.
The result is a multi-tabbed Excel spreadsheet that will divide out the assets as they are inventoried into Servers, Hypervisors, VMs, Local Disks and Cluster Disks.
The same benefits and features of the collector apply. However, inventory mode will obviously ONLY conduct inventory. Performance of these machines is only available through one of the two customary methods of gathering data.
Online Performance Collections are best limited to physical servers in a project. That is most often under 200 physical servers. The Online Viewer navigation simply wasn’t built to manage 1,000s of server objects. It was built to include severs in a project where aggregating the performance & capacities need to be forecasted.
Many people have tried to use the Online Mode for Inventory purposes, but categorically, these are solving two different problems.
Now, we have two different answers!
Inventory mode is only writing to Excel. So, we don’t need to consider the complexities of how to effectively show 100s or 1,000s of objects on a screen so you can explore them. Now you are only limited by the number of rows in Excel, which is a million rows!
Inventory mode will document all your Server Hardware configurations, Service tags, and if it’s a hypervisor, Virtual Machines. Oh, and calculate all that whitespace, too!
You can add machines manually, import from a list, or connect to Active Directory/LDAP.
Note: In case you are wondering -- yes, we are adding an IP Range/Subnet Scan, too. That is Phase 2, along with a few other goodies!