Hi.

You can go to http://support.dell.com, and follow the link to download drivers.  Navigate to the R710 (or enter your service tag).

Go to the "Lifecycle Controller" section, and you will see a download for "Dell Application - OS Drivers Pack".  here's a direct link to the most current release for the R710:

hope that helps,

Greg

Hi Greg,

Nice to get a response from you :) Sorry, I already know how to grab the OS Driver Pack itself. That's the easy part... :)

What I want to do though is maybe as part of our Task Sequence, upgrade the OS Driver Pack on the LifeCycle Controller before I inject the drivers from the LifeCycle Controller -- this will ensure that the latest drivers are always injected.

Unless we can run the OS Driver Pack directly from WinPE to upgrade the drivers in the early stages of the Task Sequence?

I'll find out if it's supported in WinPE, and reply back.

Hey Greg,

Great thanks :) Out of interest, how do you/Dell do this for your servers? What about for firmware upgrades?

I have had a look at Repository Manager -- this looks ideal, but it seems like you need to go into the LifeCycle Controller interactively, point it to your internal FTP server, and pull down the pre-approved/synchronised updates. It would be great to automate it as part of the Task Sequence -- without having to download each firmware package manually for each model one by one from support.dell.com ;(

Cheers.

Hey again Greg,

Thanks for clearing that up. Cool, I will check out Repository Manager & using Lightweight Deployment Scripts. If you have any walkthroughs or sample code for some quick wins, I'd be real interested :)

It's been on my list to get some of that server OSD info out on www.delltechcenter.com - we have some at www.dell.com/configmgr - but there's a bit more I need to find the time to post  - I'll try to get it up there in the next couple of weeks.

Greg

I confirmed that the .exe's are not supported in winpe.  Even if they were, it would be a bit of a conflict, because when  you start the os deployment process using the lifecycle controller, the lifecycle controller surfaces your required drivers, so the drivers are held in use during the WinPE Phase. . . As for how we do it for firmware, we use Repository Manager to create "Lightweight Deployment Scripts" for each model - and run those during the post-os installation phase (still in the task seuqence, but just after we've applied the OS, and are in Windows...). I've heard of some that use SUU (Server Update Utility) to update firmware and drivers... There will be an update in the future for LifeCycle Controller integration to handle firmware updates - stay tuned! (btw - as far as I know, you will *always* need to download drivers first though :( )   hope that helps a little, Greg