R610/R710 iDRAC6 discovery problems

Jshardlow, 

I would have also suggested updating them to 6.5 at least, or 6.6 which was released day before yesterday. I would also be certain that the iDracs not at 2.91 are also updated to current, as the iDrac is what is communicating with OME.

Let me know how your testing goes.

 

At risk of looking a bit silly I think I've narrowed it down to the BIOS versions. It looks like the servers that are detected properly are on 6.5 and those that aren't or are not sicovered at all are on 6.3. I'll try and get some downtime to confirm this and report back.

I'm not having much luck unfortunately. On the servers I've managed to upgrade (BIOS/iDRAC/OMSA) they fall into two groups. The first are discovered but have a health state of unknown and do not have a model listed. They pass both the Troubleshooting Tool WSMAN test and the winrm test. The second refuse to be discovered. They pass the Troubleshooting Tool WSMAN test, but not the winrm test (it returns to the command prompt with no output). In all cases the iDRACs are reachable and work fine. In some cases there are comparable partner servers of the same build/setup etc that work fine. I've tired rebooting, power-cycling and even unplugging the power completely. I've also tried turning system services and inventory collection on/off in the BIOS/iDRAC menus. In short I'm at a complete loss as to why some servers are OK and others not. It is quite purplexing and infuriating.

Hi Jamie, thanks for the post.

Right, so....for our 11G servers like the 610's, our support is somewhat limited.  You can discover them and get a bit of inventory, but you will not get rollup health--likely it will show as unknown.  You _will_ get formatted SNMP traps in the Alert console.  Basically, the iDRAC instrumentation on 11G is slightly different from 12/13/14G and we are not able to show rollup health.  Hope this helps.

Rob

Hi,

I'm not too bothered about the lack of health and showing up as unknown, I'm used to that and I appreciate it's a limitation of their design. I'm more worried about them either not being able to be discovered at all, or if they are they not being able to be recognised as an R610/R710.

Cheers, Jamie

Hi Jamie,

Hmmm, is the iDRAC f/w for the 610/710 the latest and greatest?  And yes, you should keep inventory collector BIOS setting on.  If the WSMan troubleshooting test is working, I would think it should get discovered.  We may need a support ticket to take a closer look.

Thx

Rob

Hi, Yes in all these cases the iDRAC is at 2.91. Depending on the server then I'm aiming to get the BIOS to be 6.5 or 6.6. Cheers, Jamie

Hi--

Aware that this is an old thread, but in view of Dell not supporting OM Essentials anymore, did you get OM Enterprise to inventory R610s reliably after you updated their Bios to v6.6?

If this worked for you, then I'll go that route.  It is a shame that OM Ent does not include OMSA as an inventory protocol like OM Essentials does.  I wonder why Dell did not include OMSA communication in OM Ent.  OMSA makes everything easier.