Chapter 1. What's New in this Release

Table of Contents

Major New Features/Improvements
New and Changed Platform Support

Major New Features/Improvements

The major new features introduced in this release since the version 8 release are:

  • Additional Virtual Machine platforms are now supported. The VmGuest class now supports VMware Virtual Server 2.0. VMware ESX is now also officially supported as a valid Linux platform with full discovery capabilities. The VmHost class now supports detection of whether the system is running within a Microsoft Hyper-V guest.

  • XML output encoding has been implemented for the first time in SysInfo™. This allows a customer supplied XML parser to read all SysInfo™ data in a program readable format. All data available through SysInfo™'s field deliminated Report encoding is available as XML. See the SysInfo Reference Manual for the --encode xml option.

  • New Process class has been introduced with this release. The Process class provides a list of all processes running on a system at run-time. Attributes include the process ID, command name, command line, CPU time, CPU percentage, virtual memory size, and resident memory size.

  • An additional 17 Enterprise Software products are now discoveried. The new product discovery support includes: Apache Tomcat, CA BrightStor Server, HP OpenView Data Protector, IBM DB2, IBM Informix C-ASAM, IBM Informix Enterprise Gateway Manager, IBM Informix I-SPY, IBM Informix MaxConnect, IBM Informix Extended Parallel Server, IBM Tivoli App Dependency Discovery Manager, IBM Tivoli COmposite App Manager for WebSphere Data Collector, IBM Tivoli Configuration Discovery and Tracking, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager, IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console, IBM Tivoli Netcool, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployments, Sun Java/JRE.

  • Chassis Serial Number is a new General class attribute which reports the serial number of the system chassis. This value is usually only reported on blade systems where the Chassis Serial Number differs from the System Serial Number. Support is limited to systems which support IPMI access to Baseboard Management Cards (BMC).

  • SMBIOS 2.6.0 is now supported. The previous release supported 2.4.0 features.

  • CPU Core and Thread count is now reported for Intel and AMD CPU's as attributes CoreCount and ThreadCount.

  • Improved SMBIOS device handling. Hardware devices discovered via SMBIOS are more tightly aligned and automatically intergrated with devices discovered via other means. This should result in fewer duplicate devices and increased attribute reporting for devices discovered via both SMBIOS and other means.

  • Additional Monitor hardware capability data is now included. The additional attributes are MinVerRefresh, MaxVerRefresh, MinHorRefresh, MaxHorRefresh, and MaxPixelClock.

  • Increased stability from a major overall of how Class data is handled internally should continue to make SysInfo™ one of the most stable asset and configuration agents available.

  • Bug fixes from the previous release have now been all rolled up into this release to provide a more stable and reliable product.

For a complete list of new features and bug fixes in this release, please read the doc/CHANGES.txt file found in the distribution.