Overview

Lenovo XClarity Administrator is Lenovo’s centralised hardware management appliance. It runs as a virtual appliance inside the data centre and takes ownership of Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile servers, Flex System chassis and the components mounted in them. Once an endpoint is managed, XClarity keeps a live inventory of it: machine type and model, serial number, firmware levels, health and power state, and the rack, chassis and bay it physically occupies. It also holds the firmware compliance policies and the configuration patterns used to drive settings onto the hardware.

The ReadyWorks connector talks to the XClarity Administrator REST API. It offers one authentication method, HTTP Basic with a username and password, sent against the API Domain you supply. Every shipped job is a plain GET against a single XClarity inventory resource (/nodes, /chassis, /switches and so on), and the JSON that comes back is written to a staging table named with an lxca_ prefix. There is no token exchange and no session to maintain, so each job authenticates and reads in one pass.

In a ReadyWorks context this supplies the physical layer beneath everything virtual. Node, chassis and switch inventory gives you serial numbers and warranty identifiers for refresh and decommission planning, the compliance jobs tell you which managed devices are running firmware below their assigned policy, and the cabinet view places each device in a rack so a data centre move or a rack power event can be scoped to the workloads it touches. Joined to a hypervisor connector, it lets you trace a virtual machine down to the Lenovo node and chassis carrying it.

The connector is declared bidirectional and the outbound job form is enabled, but no outbound templates ship with it. As delivered it is an inbound feed. Sending anything back to XClarity means authoring an outbound job yourself.

NOTE: All 18 inbound templates ship with Enabled set to No. Nothing runs until you review each job and turn on the ones you want.

Connector Properties

Authentication Methods

The connector offers a single authentication method. XClarity Administrator accepts HTTP Basic credentials directly on its REST API, so no separate token call is needed.

NOTE: Both the authentication call and the data calls run with certificate verification disabled (SSL_VERIFYHOST and SSL_VERIFYPEER are off). XClarity appliances are normally deployed with a self-signed certificate, so this is what makes the connection work out of the box. If you have replaced the appliance certificate with one issued by a trusted CA, the connector still will not validate it.

Method 1: Basic Authorization: Username / Password (LENOVO XCLARITY_e5d63e15ae)

Connect to a GET method API with a username / password

Sends an Authorization: Basic header built from the username and password saved on the connection, Base64 encoded at run time. Use a dedicated XClarity user account with a read-only or supervisor-equivalent role that has visibility of every managed endpoint, since the inventory jobs return only what that account is authorised to see. The same header is used on every call, so there is no session to expire mid-run.

Connection Configuration Fields (5)

Authentication Configuration

Headers sent on the authentication call:

cURL options:

Inbound Job Fields Enabled (44)

The inbound job form exposes the standard REST job fields: endpoint, return data node, pagination, three levels of enumeration, and the staging table the response lands in.

Outbound Job Fields Enabled (13)

Inbound Job Templates (18)

Eighteen inbound templates ship, one per XClarity Administrator inventory resource plus a blank scaffold. All of them are GET calls on a Daily schedule, and all of them ship disabled. None sets a return data node, so the whole JSON document is parsed and the top-level collection becomes the rows of the destination table.

Job Template Configuration

Settings Common to All Eighteen Templates

Settings That Vary by Template

NOTE: The compliance jobs overlap deliberately. Compliance Policies gives you the policy definitions, Compliance Policies Compare Results and Compliance Policies Persisted Result give you the per-device verdicts, and Compliance Policies Applicable Firmware gives you the upgrade targets. Enable the persisted-result job for routine reporting and reserve the compare job for on-demand checks.

Outbound Job Templates (0)

No outbound templates ship with this connector. The outbound job form is enabled, so you can author your own, but nothing is written back to XClarity by default.