As a system administrator, you can now monitor for vulnerabilities and inventory status in the vCenter Management Console after deploying the sensors. Here you can also deploy the sensors onto the virtual machines. To open the Carbon Black overview, click Menu > Carbon Black. Here you will find a summary of your Appliance Health, Inventory status, and possible Vulnerabilities. In this case, we want to enable a sensor, so click on the Inventory tab and select Not Enabled. Select a virtual machine of choice and click on Enable. To start the sensor installation on that VM. You will be prompted with a popup where you have the ability to configure some advanced settings. For now, we want to install the sensor with a default configuration, so click on Enable to continue. The installation will take a couple of minutes. You can click on the Enabled tab and refresh your page until your selected VM is shown.

Another way to enable a sensor or multiple sensors is through the CBC Management page. Open the management page and go to Inventory > VM Workloads > Not Enabled. Here you will find an overview of not enabled virtual machines. Select a virtual machine, click the orange Take Action button, and select Install Sensor. Just as in vCenter, a popup will be shown to specify some advanced settings. We still want to use the default configuration, so click Install to start the installation. After a couple of minutes, click on the Enabled tab to view your newly installed sensor.

You can also install the sensors by using a .MSI file. Probably not a big surprise, but yes you can also install the sensor by using a .MSI file you can download from the CBC Management page. On the VM Workload page, you have a Sensor Options button in the top right of the screen. Click on it and select Download Sensor Kits. A popup will appear where you can choose to download the installation file for the Operating System of choice. Since I only use Windows virtual machines, I download the Windows 64-bit Download kit. After you have clicked the download button, a .MSI file will be downloaded onto your computer for further use.

There are also various parameters available to install the sensor silently, check out the documentation for that. Below is the default command line to use just the basic settings. By using the various methods you have many options to install the Carbon Black sensor. I personally would prefer the MSI option to automatically install it when creating a virtual machine, especially from a VDI perspective.

Interested in how the Carbon Black sensor works in a (non-persistent) VDI environment? Keep an eye out for my next blog!