Dell XC Series Appliance and XC Core System Life Cycle Manager Reference Guide

LCM overview

Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS) 5.0 introduced the LCM framework. Dell provides the payload for the XC Series appliance. LCM automates the software and firmware updates for XC clusters.

You can upgrade the LCM framework incrementally as part of your AOS upgrade. The framework provides integrated automation of appliance hardware entity updates. LCM uses iDRAC and industry standard protocols for updates while maintaining the highly available production environment with no end-user downtime.

The goal of LCM is to run cluster-aware hardware entity updates using an automated framework. The framework eliminates the steps to update XC appliances and saves time. LCM performs cluster-aware, rolling updates on one XC Series appliance at a time. LCM provides the following turnkey capabilities:

• Enables automated inventory and update of software and firmware versions of hardware entities in the cluster:
  • BIOS
  • Backplane
  • SAS controllers
  • Network Adapter
  • iDRAC9
  • BOSS (14G, 15G, 16G, and 17G)
  • SSDs
  • NVMe (VMD disabled, VMD enabled)
• Schedule and check availability for recent updates automatically
• Live migration of VMs streamlines automation process
• Supports dark sites with LCM locality settings
• Leverages standards-based APIs offered by iDRAC Lifecycle Controller (WS-MAN, Redfish, IPMI, and RACADM CLI)
• NCC health check validates the health of a cluster
• The Prism Tasks tab enables Entity update status

The AOS 4.7.x branch is not supported. Because the installed drive version is not listed after iDRAC update, XC4510 and XC4520 models are not supported for the update.