Part Two follows on from my previous blog post, so if you haven’t seen that you might want to check it out first. This post is purely from my own experience installing Dell OMSA on ESX which I did solely to gain access to the config printing and modifying tools for the lights-out card (DRAC).
There is a full set of instructions available in PDF from Dell, but they encompass other versions of ESX I haven’t used for a long time (2.5 and thereabouts) – I can say only that I’ve installed on a select number of VMWare builds.
Anyway, to cut to the chase. Firstly check the build version of ESX.
# vmware -v
# VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 build-153875
Awesome. This means that the patch level supercedes the warning notice in the PDF (if you choose to read it) which states:
NOTICE: On ESX 3.5 systems, Patch ESX350-200802412-BG needs to be installed prior to the
OpenManage Installation. This patch addresses an issue related to event reporting in Dell OMSS.
This patch may be downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html.
For further details, refer to http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003459.
Basically what the patch 200802412-BG does is fix a problem with reporting in the OpenManage service. I don’t think it would have affected us anyway.. but just to be cautious it’s worth installing if you’re running an older version of ESX, I’d say.
Step 2. Find a copy of OpenManage. Whether this is the DVD that came with your server, downloaded from http://support.dell.com, or an ISO image, you will have to mount it since it’s just way too hard to figure out what RPMs and dependencies you’ll need (at least it was in my opinion!). Mount it on the Service Console, then do the following:
cd /mnt/cdrom (or wherever you mounted it to)
cd SYSMGMT/srvadmin/linux/supportscripts
Install OpenManage. Note the flag -r for a DRAC server. (The others are: -b base install; -w web interface; -s OpenManage Storage Management (OMSM) which I’m not sure of.)
./srvadmin-install.sh -b -w -r -s
Start OpenManage services, or reboot here:
srvadmin-services.sh start
Then configure the ESX server firewall to allow connections to the web console of OMSA.
esxcfg-firewall -o 1311,tcp,in,OpenManageRequest
Don’t forget to unmount the CD when you reboot.