ZENworks 7 Server Management uses the Inventory scanner to collect hardware and software information from NetWare and Windows inventoried servers.
The scanner collects hardware details such as: floppy disk drive, hard disk drive, BIOS, bus, mouse, keyboard, display adapters, network adapter cards, modems, Jaz drives, Zip drives, sound cards, memory cards, serial ports, parallel ports, processors, and modems. The software scanning includes checking for applications on the inventoried servers and reporting the information about the scanned software, such as the vendor name, the product name and version, etc.
The following sections contain detailed information about the Inventory scanners:
You can customize the hardware information and the software information to be scanned. For more information, see Section 16.2, Customizing the Hardware Inventory Information To Be Scanned and Section 16.3, Customizing the Software Inventory Information To Be Scanned For the ZENworks 7 Inventoried Servers.
Subscriber must be installed and configured on the inventoried servers.
The Server Inventory policy lets you configure the scanning schedule based on which the policy engine schedules and enforces scanning at the inventoried servers.
The Inventory scanner checks whether an updated dictionary is available at its Inventory server and downloads the updated dictionary.
The Policy Enforcer first reads the inventory settings configured in the Inventory Service object and the Server Inventory policy, and then launches the Inventory scanner.
The scanner scans for the hardware and software information.
The scan information collected by the scanners is stored as scan data files (.str). The files are sent to the Inventory server.
The Inventory scanner scans for the hardware and software inventory information on the NetWare inventoried servers. For more information, review the following sections:
Following are the sources on the NetWare inventoried servers from where the hardware inventory information is scanned:
For more information about the hardware information collected by the Inventory scanner, see Section K.0, Hardware Information Collected by the Inventory Scanners.
The scanners collect certain hardware (device) and network information based on SNMP. Additionally, the scanner also uses SNMP to report software installed and registered in products.dat. The scanner uses SNMP v2.0 and the services of hostmib.nlm, ipxrtr.nlm, and ipxrtrnm.nlm.
The Inventory scanners use the SMBIOS information embedded into the BIOS of most hardware to report BIOS version, BIOS release date, Manufacturer, asset tag, product name, serial number, processor information, cache information, system slots information, port information, video adapter name, sound card name, and so on. The Inventory scanner reads information from SMBIOS with the help of invaid.nlm.
Probe is a special built-in algorithm in the Inventory scanner, which is used to collect hardware information.
The Inventory scanner scans the following software inventory information on the NetWare inventoried servers:
The scanner collects software information from the following sources on the inventoried servers: Microsoft* Installer (MSI), Add-Remove Programs, Dictionary-based scan, and Probe.
Products.Dat: Includes software that are installed on the NetWare inventoried servers.
Dictionary-based scan: Includes software that are collected based on the software dictionary rules. For more information, see Section 16.3, Customizing the Software Inventory Information To Be Scanned For the ZENworks 7 Inventoried Servers.
Probe: Probe is a special built-in algorithm in the Inventory scanner, which is used to collect software information about ZENworks Suite and its installed components.
Table 14-1 shows the software information collected by the scanner from the various sources:
Table 14-1 Software Information collected by the NetWare Inventory Scanner
The scanner collects the total disk usage information for the file extensions that are configured in the Software Dictionary editor. For more information, see Section 16.3, Customizing the Software Inventory Information To Be Scanned For the ZENworks 7 Inventoried Servers.
The scanner reports the following information for the files that match with the dictionary entries, and the files that belong to the unidentified software list, which is configured using the software dictionary rules. For more information, see Section 16.3.10, Configuring the Software Dictionary Rules
The scanner reports the following file attributes: FileName, FileSize, LastModifiedTime, InternalName, FileVersion, ProductName, ProductVersion, CompanyName, Language, DirectoryPath, and SoftwareDictionaryID.
The scanner collects information about the latest virus definition date and version of McAfee Netshield* 4.6.x installed on the inventoried servers.
The Inventory scanner scans for the hardware and software inventory information on the Windows inventoried servers. For more information, review the following sections:
Following are the sources on the inventoried servers from where the hardware inventory information is scanned:
For more information about the hardware information collected by the Inventory scanner, see Section K.0, Hardware Information Collected by the Inventory Scanners.
The scanners for scanning the inventoried servers also include scanning based on the industry-standard Desktop Management Interface (DMI) specification 2.0. These programs use the Management Interface (MI) of DMI to look for the hardware components installed on the inventoried server. The scanners scan for specific components that are instrumented on the inventoried server through DMI. The scanners query the DMI service layer to retrieve this information.
The MI allows the DMI-compliant scanners to probe the Service Provider within the Service Layer. The Service Provider collects information from the manageable components and stores the collected information in the Management Information Format database. The Component Interface (CI) communicates with the manageable components and the Service layer. The following figure shows the scanner interaction with DMI.
For more information on DMI standards, see the DMTF Web site.
NOTE:If the inventoried servers are DMI compliant and if the Enable DMI Scan check box is selected in the Server Inventory policy, the scanners collect hardware information by querying the DMI Service Layer. Otherwise, the scanners probe for the hardware.
We recommend that you instrument DMI and also install DMI components that are supplied by the vendors.
For example, if you have a Compaq* Family Deskpro* EN Model-SFF6500 running under Windows 98, download the Management Product software - Compaq Insight Management Desktop Agents software for Windows 98 from the Compaq Web site.
For Dell, access the DM/Desktop Management Utilities software from the Dell Web site.
The scanners collect hardware information from Windows inventoried servers based on Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) specification.
WMI is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) that enables accessing management information in an enterprise environment. WMI 1.5 is fully compliant with Common Information Model (CIM) schema, which is an industry standard. For more information, see Microsoft WMI Web site. WMI also works with existing management standards, such as DMI and SNMP.
The scanners use WMI to look for the hardware components installed on the inventoried server. The scanners also scan for specific components that are instrumented on the inventoried server through WMI.
WMI-compliant scanners are supported on Windows inventoried servers only.
You can view the WMI information of the inventoried servers in the Server Inventory.
To obtain WMI information from the inventoried server, you must first download Microsoft's Windows Management Instrumentation - Core Software Installation from Microsoft WMI Web site, and then install WMI Core Software on Windows 98 servers
IMPORTANT:Only the WMI Core Software Installation download is required to instrument an inventoried server for WMI. To troubleshoot any WMI related problems, you can use the WMI SDK download. Also, on Windows 2000 servers, the WMI Core Software is already installed.
By default, both DMI and WMI scanning are enabled. To disable either DMI or WMI scanning, deselect the check box in the Inventory policy window.
Probe is a special built-in algorithm in the Inventory scanner, which is used to collect software information.
The Inventory scanner scans for the following software inventory information on the Windows inventoried servers:
The scanner collects software information from the following sources on the inventoried woks tat ion:
MSI: Includes software that are installed on the inventoried servers using the Microsoft Installer.
Add-Remove Programs: Includes software that are listed in the Add/Remove Programs window.
Dictionary-based scan: Includes software that is collected based on the software dictionary rules. For more information, see Section 16.3, Customizing the Software Inventory Information To Be Scanned For the ZENworks 7 Inventoried Servers
Probe: Probe is a special built-in algorithm in the Inventory scanner.It is used to collect software information about Windows operating system, Internet Explorer, Media Player, Outlook Express, Microsoft Office and its installed components, Novell Client and its installed components, and ZENworks suite and its installed components.
Table 14-2 shows the software information collected by the scanner from the various sources:
Table 14-2 Software Information collected by the Windows Inventory Scanner
The scanner collects the total disk usage information for the file extensions that are configured in the Software Dictionary editor. For more information, see Section 16.3, Customizing the Software Inventory Information To Be Scanned For the ZENworks 7 Inventoried Servers.
The scanner reports certain information for the files that match with the dictionary entries, and the files that belong to the unidentified software list, which is configured using the software dictionary rules. For more information, see Section 16.3.10, Configuring the Software Dictionary Rules
The scanner reports the following file attributes: FileName, FileSize, LastModifiedTime, InternalName, FileVersion, ProductName, ProductVersion, CompanyName, Language, DirectoryPath, and SoftwareDictionaryID.
The scanner collects information about the latest virus definition date and version that is installed on the inventoried servers for the following product versions: