Workstation Inventory

ZENworks^{^TM} has a complete hardware and software inventory with centralized database support and the ability to query the inventory database of the managed workstations from the console.

Inventory of managed workstations involves the following features and components:

Hardware and Software Inventory of Managed Workstations

ZENworks uses platform-dependent scan programs to determine the hardware and software present at the workstations. The inventory scan program, WINSCAN.EXE, scans Windows* 95 and Windows 98 over IP/IPX^{^TM}. The scan program, NTSCAN32.EXE, scans Windows NT* workstations over IP/IPX.

The scan program collects the hardware details such as: Floppy Disk Drive, Hard Disk Drive, BIOS, Bus, Mouse, Keyboard, Display Adapters, Network Adapter Cards, Memory, Serial Ports, and Parallel Ports.

The software scanning of the scan programs includes checking the existence of the applications on the workstations and reporting the information about the scanned software, such as name of the software and version.

Refer to Scan Information Collected by ZENworks Scan Programs for more details about the scan information collected on Windows 95, Window 98, and Windows NT managed workstations.

Refer to Hardware and Software Inventory of Managed Workstations to know more about how the inventory of workstations takes place.

DMI-Compliant Scan Programs

The inventory scan programs for scanning workstations (Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT) also include scanning based on the industry-standard Desktop Management Interface (DMI) specification Version 2.0. These programs use the Management Interface (MI) of DMI to look for the hardware and software components installed on the PC. It will scan for all components that are instrumented on the workstation through DMI. The data collected by these components are stored in the DMI MIF database on the workstation. The scan programs will query the DMI service layer to retrieve this information.

Refer to DMI-Compliant Scan Programs for more details about the DMI-compliance architecture of the inventory scan programs.

Software Scanning Based on Policies and Software List Editor

Inventory scan programs collect the software information at the managed workstations based on the list of applications listed in the Software List Editor and selected in the Software Scan Policy. The Software Scan policy in the Inventory Policy customizes the software scanning of applications at the workstations, which are associated with the policy package. By default, the Software List Editor contains description of up to 8,000 software applications.

Refer to Software Scanning Preferences for more information about customizing the software scanning.

Inventory Scan Settings

The Inventory Policy settings stored in NDS^{^TM} are associated with a Workstation object or with the Organization Unit under which the Workstation objects are registered.

The Inventory Policy contains details to identify the inventory and database server for a particular workstation, and to enable software scanning at the workstation.

Refer to Configuring Inventory Policy Settings for Scanning Inventory for inventory scan settings.

Schedule Workstation Scanning

The Scheduler lets you set up different actions to run the scan programs on one or more managed workstations. The Scheduler allows configuration of scanning time and event scheduling.

Refer to Understanding Scheduling of Policies and Policy Packages for more information.

Inventory Information of Scanned Workstations

From the Console, you can view the inventory information of the registered workstations. The data from the last inventory scan for the workstation is displayed.

Refer to Display of Inventory Scan and Query Information for more information about the workstation inventory records.

Querying Inventory Database from the Console

The inventory database stores inventory data for each managed workstation. The database provides hardware, software, memory, and environmental information of the managed workstations on the network. Querying the inventory database provides information with specific inventory characteristics. For example, you can query the database to find workstations that have Pentium* Pro processors. The query results in displaying the workstations that match the query criteria. Management operations can be performed on these workstations.

The inventory database server is supported on NetWare^{^®} 5 or 4.x.

Refer to Display of Inventory Scan and Query Information for more information about the workstation inventory records.

Storage of Inventory Data in the Inventory Database and NDS

The inventory database functions as a repository of hardware and software information of the workstations. This database is a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) maintained in Sybase*.

ZENworks provides an option to back up the inventory database from NetWare^® Administrator.Refer to ZENworks Database Backup for more information about the backup and restore process.

On collection of data from the managed workstations, the scan program sends the scan data report to the inventory components in the inventory server. Each managed workstation is identified by the workstation DN and the tree name sent by the scan programs. The scan data is saved in the inventory database, and minimal scan data is stored in the NDS workstation object. You can view this information from the Console.

Refer to Inventory Server Components for more information about the individual components.

Hardware and Software Reports

From the inventory information in the database, you can run reports to gather the inventory information specific to your needs.

You can generate any of the pre-defined hardware and software inventory reports. Once you run the reports, you can print the reports from the reporting tool.

To run reports, you need to set up the Reporting Tool. The ZENworks Reporting Tool is accessed through the Tools menu in NetWare Administrator. However, the menu option is disabled until you run a ZENworks Reporting Application object on your workstation. Running the Application Object configures the workstation to communicate with the inventory database that serves as the data source for your reports. The reporting database resides on a NetWare server that has ZENworks installed. The application object is located in the same NDS context as the server that hosts the reporting database. Refer to ZENworks Reporting for more information about the types of reports you can generate.