Chapter 9 -- Inventory Collection

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Chapter 9

Collection of hardware and software inventory from Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) clients is certainly one of the more popular client options that SMS administrators can enable for their SMS sites. Inventory collection offers the obvious advantage of reporting to a central database certain specific pieces of information that can be of interest or use to the SMS administrator. Data such as disk space, memory, processor type, network interface card (NIC), operating system, IP address, and software installed can be reported to the SMS database. You might then use that information to identify which clients need an upgrade or a patch for a particular piece of software or an upgrade to Microsoft Windows 2000, for example, or to identify which clients have the hardware requirements to support the upgrade.

In this chapter we'll explore the inventory collection process for hardware and software, including how to enable the hardware inventory and software inventory, how to view inventory, and how to customize the hardware inventory. As in previous chapters, we'll also look at the log files and status messages that are generated throughout the inventory collection process and discuss how to interpret them.