Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Book Image

IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02

Overview of this book

OCS Inventory NG is a cross-platform, open-source inventory and asset management solution. It brings more than plentiful features to the table to satisfy the business needs of small-to-large organizations with up to tens of thousands of computers. However, to put this inventory solution to optimum use requires a lot of skill.This book will lead you through the steps of implementing OCS-NG until you master working with it. This book aims at reducing efforts involved in resource management. The solution gives a robust foundation on top of which we can implement other third party applications, plugins, and much more.This book begins with the basics—it explains what IT inventorying needs are to be met in the real-world. Then, it covers a step-by-step approach to everything you need to know to set up and implement OCS-NG as a centralized inventory solution to meet all these requirements. It delves deeper into carrying out inventory tasks with every chapter.You will learn how to choose the best agent type and deployment method. We discuss the process of gathering inventory data and cover techniques for creating and deploying packages. You will also learn how to acquire added benefits with the use of plugins. We discuss best practices on inventorying and troubleshooting agent-related problems. The book presents real-world inventorying scenarios along with their solutions. You will basically learn how to use OCS-NG to get the most out of it.As a conclusion, if you want to learn about a free solution that fulfils inventorying necessities of the real-world, this is the book for you.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IT Inventory and Resource Management with OCS Inventory NG 1.02
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
Preface
Keeping Pace with Version Updates—Glancing over the changelog of the Latest Release

Tweaking the OCS-NG server for performance


One of the most significant advantages of OCS Inventory NG comes mainly from its performance. The inventory for every machine is really lightweight thanks to its XML syntax. It requires little-to-no CPU processing power. This way, it does not put any load on most of today's processors. However, in the case of large environments, it needs a relatively beefy server with a big RAM size.

Keep in mind that the software was designed in 2005. Back then, most mid-sized enterprise servers had around or less than 3GB of RAM. We should not forget about the 32-bit limitations as well. The official documentation states that when working with inventories with as many as 70,000 clients, they needed 3GB of memory. They also picked a distributed setup that spread across 3x 2.8GHz Xeon servers.

Nowadays, one new generation server can cope with such a similar load, assuming it has more or at least 4GB of RAM—preferably 8GB. But if we dedicate such a workhorse power...