The Dell EMC OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) is designed to streamline the management processes in your data center environment by allowing you to use VMware vCenter Server to manage your physical and virtual full server infrastructure.

The following list includes a few examples of how the OMIVV will expand and enrich your data center management experience with Dell vSAN Ready Nodes:

• Monitors system level information (hardware inventory)
• Bubbles up system alerts for action in vCenter
• Rolls out firmware updates for an ESXi or vSAN cluster that can leverage DRS
• Bare metal deployment

OMIVV brings all relevant information from different sources together to reduce pre-upgrade planning time and extends Dell systems’ management capabilities from iDRAC directly to vCenter.

Combining OMIVV with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) provides a unified software and firmware life cycle management solution to configure and upgrade ESXi clusters.

In this unified scenario, a VMware administrator can see both the physical and virtual host information from a single pane of glass. OMIVV acts as a firmware provider within vLCM to combine ESXi iso image, driver, and firmware baselines in one process flow.

Figure 16.    vSAN Lifecycle Management with vLCM + OMIVV

In this simplified management experience, OMIVV provides PowerEdge hardware inventory information directly in host view, cluster view, and in the OMIVV dashboard within vCenter.

Figure 17.    OMIVV vCenter dashboard

IT administrators often use different tools to life cycle manage infrastructure. vLCM with OMIVV reduces operational complexity by providing a single tool for life cycle management activities. This also reduces the amount of time that is dedicated to monitoring the environment for compliance, with a more robust, desired-state model.

vLCM eliminates the need for server vendor update tools by consolidating the number of tools that are required for software and hardware updates to one.

vLCM also automatically validates that the HBA firmware is on the hardware compatibility list, giving administrators confidence that their updates will be successful.

vLCM introduces a new implementation model, called the desired-state model. This model reduces time spent monitoring and troubleshooting. Administrators create an image for their HCI cluster and vLCM implements the image.

In addition, vLCM continuously monitors that all nodes in the cluster comply with the image. If vLCM detects any drift from the wanted image, it will automatically remediate the drift back to the wanted image.