Power State and Credential Requirements for Successful Scans and Deployments to Virtual Machines

An offline virtual machine (workstation-based or hosted on a server) is a file or set of files. To scan or deploy to an offline virtual machine requires permissions to the file system where the files reside. An online virtual machine is almost indistinguishable from a physical machine. To scan or deploy patches to an online virtual machine requires credentials for an administrator account on the virtual machine operating system.

Because of these differences between online and offline virtual machines, you may need to provide two sets of credentials – one for when the virtual machine is in the online state and one for when it is in the offline state.

For workstation virtual machines, if you wish to scan and/or deploy to the virtual machine in either its online or offline state, you should add the virtual machine to the machine group twice:

  • For its online state, enter the machine identifier and online credentials in the machine group as you would any physical machine – on the Machine Name, Domain Name, IP Address/Range, or Organizational Unit tab.
  • For its offline state, enter the information and credentials for the virtual machine file locations on the Workstation Virtual Machines tab.

For hosted virtual machines, you only need to specify the machine once, on the Hosted Virtual Machines tab. Separate credentials, however, are still required to access the machine in either the online or offline state. The browse credentials you enter when connecting to the VMware server are used when the machine is in the offline state. You should enter online credentials for each hosted virtual machine using the Set Admin Credentials option in the bottom pane of the machine group editor.

The following table summarizes the credentials used for various machine types.

Machine Type

Machine State

Machine Group Tab Used to Define the Virtual Machine

Credentials Required

Physical Machine

Online

Machine Name, Domain Name, IP Address/Range, Org Unit

Machine or machine group credentials

Workstation VM

Online

Machine Name, Domain Name, IP Address/Range, Org Unit

Machine or machine group credentials

Workstation VM

Offline

Workstation Virtual Machines

Machine or machine group credentials

Hosted VM

Online

Hosted Virtual Machines

Machine or machine group credentials

Hosted VM

Offline

Hosted Virtual Machines

Browse credentials (the creds used to log on to the VM server)

Integrated credentials will not work for deployments to offline virtual machines.

If you specify both online and offline credentials for virtual machines, you will be able to scan and deploy to those virtual machines whether they are online or offline.

For more information, see Deploying Patches to Virtual Machines.