Hello. I am a Domain Support Engineer in the Systems Management space here at Dell. Today we will be covering the OpenManage Enterprise Integration for VMware vCenter plugin, commonly referred to as OMEVV. Firmware deployment prerequisites. In order to deploy a firmware baseline via the OMEVV plugin, you will need the Update Manager plugin installed in OpenManage Enterprise.
We have already installed the needed plugins and registered with vCenter for this demonstration. These hosts must also have the OME Advance+ license installed for this option to be successful, which takes the place of the traditional license needed for OMIVV. A firmware repository profile, the server has to be added to OME via the DRAC and added to a cluster in vCenter for OMEVV to identify that in the inventory.
Repository profile then uses a firmware catalog to get the firmware information .In this case OME is integrated with OMEVV and connects to downloads.dell.com automatically. The baseline profile uses a repository profile as a baseline to compare the firmware inventory with the current device inventory. Ror this example we will create a repo for ESX Server from the Dell customized images, and here is the site that we plan to use.
We'll select ‘Plugins’, ‘Update Manager’ and ‘Repository’. ‘Create repository’. We will call this ‘ESXTest’. For the ‘Base Catalog’ we will select ‘Index catalog’, for ‘Catalog Groups’ we will select the ‘ESXi Catalog for Enterprise Servers’. We see the most current date is September 5th, 2023, but we could use an older file if desired. We can change this to ‘Automatic’ or ‘Manual’. Select ‘Next’, and I have one host in OM already added. Select ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’. OK, once the repository’s created we'll slide over to vCenter, go to ‘OpenManage Enterprise Plugin, ‘Compliance and Deployment’.
On the ‘Repository Profile’ we want to resync the update manager plug-in repo profiles, so go ahead and do that now. OK, so now we see the share path and the location the name of the catalog.xml file and that it came from update manager plug in All right, so now we need to create a baseline compliance. Before we can do that we need a baseline profile, so we go to ‘Baseline Profiles’ and click ‘Create Baseline Profile’. We'll get started, we'll name this ‘ESXTest’, select ‘Next’. We're going to select the ‘Firmware Repository Profile’ that we just created, ‘ESXTest’ and ‘Next’.
Now we have to associate the cluster that that host is in, so we browse and then mine is in ‘Kingdom’, so my host is that one and ‘Next’. Every Sunday the drift report runs and verifies whether or not the firmware is within compliance, ‘Next’ and ‘Finish’. OK, so now that that's completed we can go to ‘Baseline Compliance’ and we can see ‘Kingdom’ is there where my host resides, and we want to ‘Run Firmware Wizard’.
Select ‘Get Started’ it's ‘ESXTest’, our Baseline profile and select ‘Next’, and we don't see any updates so let's select ‘Allow Firmware Downgrade’, so we are seeing that 6.10.80 is available in the catalog and that iDRAC is currently sitting on 7.0.0. We'll go ahead and select that and say ‘Next’. We'll call this job ‘Dell Test’ and ‘Next’. They'll test, ‘Update now’ and ‘Finish’. OK, so we can go over here to ‘Logs’, see that the job was requested for update, the iDRAC.
We can also access the iDRAC ‘Maintenance’ and ‘Lifecycle’ log, and we can see that it's currently downloading the iDRAC, so the update is underway. This entire process is repeated for VSAN or custom repositories.
Custom repos we point to the network path such as a share location including the catalog.xml in the path name, and then as mentioned, it's a repeat of the previous steps performed to have a cluster associated to a compliance baseline.
That completes this video, and have a great day.
