Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers This Dell technical white paper describes how to discover Dell PowerEdge 11th Generation or later bare metal servers into the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter for hypervisor deployment.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind. © 2012 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for errors or omissions in typography or photography. Dell, the Dell logo, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Contents Executive summary ................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 5 Prerequisites .......................................................................................................... 5 Manual discovery ......................................
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Figures Figure 1. Manual discovery. Deployment Wizard Add Server dialog ........................................ 6 Figure 2. iDRAC LAN user configuration screen ................................................................. 9 Figure 3. 12th Generation Server, enabling Auto-Discovery .................................................. 10 Figure 4. 12th Generation Server, disabling an account ...........................
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Executive summary The Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter is a virtual appliance that streamlines tools and tasks associated with the management and deployment of Dell servers in your virtual environment. It reduces complexity by natively integrating the key management capabilities into the VMware vCenter console.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Manual discovery The Add Server button in the Select Servers section of the Deployment Wizard provides a method of specifying a server’s iDRAC IP address and credentials. This manual discovery process is suitable for importing a small quantity of servers where configuration of the servers and environment for AutoDiscovery is not practical. Figure 1. Manual discovery.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Auto-Discovery Auto-Discovery is a Lifecycle Controller feature for setting up a new server and registering it using a console. The advantages of using this capability includes removing the need to do cumbersome manual local configuration of a new server and enabling an automated way for a console to discover a new server that was connected to the network and plugged into power.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Prerequisites For Auto-Discovery to occur, several conditions must be met: Power: You must connect the server to the power outlet; however, the server does not need to be powered on. Network connectivity: The server’s iDRAC must have network connectivity and must communicate with the provisioning server over port 4433.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Disabling account access You must disable administrative account access to the iDRAC and if there are any iDRAC accounts with administrator privileges, you must disable them first from within the iDRAC Web console. Note that the discovery process does not run if the admin accounts are enabled. Once Auto-Discovery completes successfully, the administrative iDRAC account is enabled.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Figure 3.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Disabling accounts with the administrator role Auto-Discovery does not run if the administrator accounts are enabled on the iDRAC. From the iDRAC Web console you can add additional administrator accounts. Any additional accounts you may have enabled must be disabled through the iDRAC Web console before Auto-Discovery can run.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Enabling Auto-Discovery You can manually initiate Auto-Discovery using the iDRAC console on the server. You can enable AutoDiscovery automatically by ordering it shipped from factory in the enabled state, (See Ordering AutoDiscovery enabled systems ), or you can initiated from a WSM-MAN command. For Auto-Discovery to run, all administrative accounts on the iDRAC must be disabled.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Ordering Auto-Discovery enabled systems When ordering servers for a large rollout, make sure you specify the Auto-Discovery SKU. You can order Dell servers with the Auto-Discovery feature enabled from the factory. This Auto-Discovery feature is not enabled by default. It is off unless it is explicitly requested when the server is ordered.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Undiscovering or deleting bare-metal servers You can delete discovered bare-metal servers from the bare-metal servers list by clicking on the Remove Server button, shown below. Figure 6. Removing a discovered bare-metal server It opens another dialog box where you can select one or more servers to delete.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Troubleshooting The IDRAC trace log You can obtain information about the Auto-Discovery process by examining the iDRAC trace log of the system that is attempting Auto-Discovery. Access this log in several ways, such as using the RACLOG or using the troubleshooting section of the iDRAC Web console, and invoking racadm gettracelog and look for messages with the source idrac_discovery.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Appendix 1. - Configuring advanced security features Adding service tags to the white list The white list is a list of service tags. If white list validation is turned on, only servers with matching service tags in the list are allowed to make the connection to the provisioning server. You can add the white list servers from the Dell Management Plug-in -> Dell Management Center-> Settings- >Security section.
Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers Handshake client certificate The iDRAC handshake client certificate is signed with a Dell certificate authority root certificate for which the public key is made available by Dell to console software partners that incorporate an AutoDiscovery Provisioning Server. It is generated during the factory build of the server and is unique to every system.
