OpenManage Enterprise - Customer Success Stories
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:43:00 -0000
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We are often asked what the best tool is for managing Dell PowerEdge servers. In this blog, discover how both our in-house Dell IT team and Cambridge University, a long-term customer, use our server management solutions to manage thousands of PowerEdge servers, ultimately avoiding outages, boosting overall server productivity, reducing maintenance windows, and delivering increased operational efficiency.
How Dell IT excels in server management using Dell OpenManage
Dell’s in-house IT team manages over 18,000 PowerEdge servers. The fleet of servers range from brand new to five years old, resulting in a mix of server models and generations. These servers are located across eight major data centers globally. Workloads include Dell.com and back-office systems such as Dell’s order management system. In fact, Dell runs over 600 business applications. Many of these are mission critical, and an outage can have a major impact on customers, sales, and support, down to stopping even the production line.
Server hardware management is done via OpenManage Enterprise (OME), encompassing alerting, monitoring, firmware updating, and configuration deployment and management, as well as power consumption monitoring. Each data center has a dedicated OpenManage Enterprise instance responsible for approximately 2,500 servers.
Monitoring of server health events is covered by OME and integration with Service Now, which automatically creates trouble tickets and routes them to the appropriate team for remediation. Power usage data is collected and monitored, then used to optimize power load per rack cabinet and flag underutilized servers showing lower than expected power draw.
To aid automation and rapid distribution firmware, updates are collected, tested, and released via a customized catalogue. These custom catalogues are assembled and tested by the Dell IT server management team and are consumed by OME to orchestrate server updates. Urgent updates to resolve security CVEs can be pushed out at will by OME following a change management approval. The largest patch job completed by the team so far was an iDRAC firmware update task for 14,500 servers in one change request, demonstrating how scalable OME automation is.
Security is built into Dell’s processes and tools. Microsoft Active Directory integration enables the OME audit log to record who did what and when, recording the AD user account name. The team also use OME configuration drift detection reporting, which audits a server’s current configs against the desired state, highlighting non-conforming servers that OME can then resolve by re-applying a server template.
With Dell IT using OME at major scale in their complex production environment, any customer can be confident OME will perform at scale. As Dell IT says, “If you have Dell PowerEdge servers, you really need to be running OpenManage Enterprise.”
University of Cambridge server management at scale
With an estate of 3,500 Dell servers plus other devices in one data center, the team at Cambridge University needs efficient and scalable server management. The HPCC server group uses integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) embedded in every server and OME to maximize the day-to-day efficiency of admin tasks such as health monitoring, firmware updates, and configuration.
Config management and drift detection are achieved via OME’s configuration compliancy features. Each cluster has a collection of firmware configuration settings. These templates are set and monitored centrally via OME with alerting set for non-compliant hosts. Firmware updates are also streamlined using OME and customized in-house firmware repositories built with OME update manager. Updates are scheduled and then left to run automatically against multiple servers, freeing administrators to focus on more novel tasks. Finally, server health monitoring is real-time. Any alerts are sent from iDRAC to OME with the status notified and logged by OME. Using the Dell TechDirect service portal, the team is able log fault calls and request any required parts from Dell.
Operational highlights include:
- Reduction in time to resolution of faults
- Quicker and easier implementation of firmware updates
- Set BIOS settings configuration across an entire cluster in one easy automated job
Beyond the Dell OpenManage tools, Cambridge uses the iDRAC server telemetry feature to stream power and thermal data to Graphite and Grafana. These Dell metrics, along with values from other data center infrastructure, are aggregated and visualized for analysis of trends, ensuring the clusters are powered and cooled effectively.
Join the ranks of satisfied customers who have optimized their server management operations and enjoy the peace of mind brought about by Dell OpenManage.
Resources
- Podcast: How Would You Go About Orchestrating a Fleet of More Than 18,000 Servers?
- Dell System Management Info Hub
- OpenManage Enterprise Support
Authors:
Mark Maclean, PowerEdge & OpenManage Technical Marketing Engineering
Steve Daborn, Senior Global Product Marketing Manager
Linkedin : uk.linkedin.com/in/markmacleandell | linkedin.com/in/stephendaborn
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Migrating OMIVV to OMEVV Made Simple
Tue, 01 Aug 2023 14:05:13 -0000
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Why did the virtual machine go on a diet? Because it had too many bytes and needed to lose some weight. Recently the Dell OpenManage portfolio also went on a slight diet, consolidating OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) into a new plug-in for OpenManage Enterprise. The new solution, OpenManage Enterprise Integration for VMware vCenter (OMEVV), offers additional features such as support for 16G servers, compatibility with vCenter 8 and vSphere ESXi 8, and integration into the wider OpenManage Enterprise ecosystem.
To streamline customer migrations from OMIVV to OMEVV, the latest OMIVV release, version 5.4.1, includes a migration tool. Dell Technologies has published a white paper detailing the migration steps: Migrating from OMIVV to OMEVV. The white paper discusses both the migration tool and also relevant OMEVV REST APIs for future automation.
The OMIVV to OMEVV Migration Tool supports:
- VMware ESXi hosts that are inventoried and managed in OMIVV
- Updates to event and alarm settings
- Changes to severity of Dell health update notifications for VMware Proactive High Availability (PHA) event rules
Just ensure that the Dell servers to be migrated are compliant with the compatibility matrix. For example, only PowerEdge 13th Generation servers or higher are supported. Also, an OpenManage Enterprise Advanced+ license is required on each of the servers that will be migrated to OMEVV.
The migration tool is launched through https://<OMIVV-instance-IP>/MigrationTool/login. Once logged in, administrators are reminded of the migration prerequisites, such as OpenManage Enterprise must be deployed and the OMEVV plug-in must be accessible from OMIVV through the network. Once the connection from OMIVV is authenticated, single or multiple vCenter instances can be selected for migration.
Details of the migration status can be displayed as the task runs, and, once complete, a summary of the migration tasks is displayed. The selected vCenter instances are automatically unregistered from OMIVV and registered in OMEVV alongside all the hosts transferring to the OpenManage Enterprise plug-in. Details of the migration jobs are also recorded in the OpenManage Enterprise event log.
The transition from an OMIVV stand-alone appliance to the OMEVV plug-in enables customers to reduce the complexity of data center management by streamlining the tools associated with managing and monitoring Dell servers in the vSphere environment. At the same time, the OMEVV plug-in gives customers access to the wider OpenManage Enterprise ecosystem. This includes Power Manager, phone support through the Dell services plug-in, and integration with CloudIQ, Dell's cloud-based AIOps monitoring and management solution for Dell's data center infrastructure portfolio.
The inclusion of the migration tool in OMIVV 5.4.1 helps customers of all sizes migrate to the newer OMEVV server management architecture with the latest features and benefits of automation, security, and efficiency.
Resources
- Migrating from OMIVV to OMEVV white paper
- OpenManage Enterprise Integration for VMware Virtual Center Overview
- OpenManage Enterprise Integration for VMware vCenter 1.2 Support Matrix
- OpenManage Enterprise Advanced + 90 day trial license keys
- OpenManage quick insight OMEVV short overview video
Author:
Mark Maclean, PowerEdge Technical Marketing Engineering
Linkedin : uk.linkedin.com/in/markmacleandell
Unveiling the Power of OpenManage Enterprise Backup and Restore
Fri, 16 Jun 2023 15:18:13 -0000
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What does Roger Federer call his backup racket? The Federer Reserve, but as all server administrators know, having a backup is no joke!
Given that OpenManage Enterprise delivers key deployment, monitoring, updating, and reporting, ensuring the availability of this management solution is a key requirement. Earlier this year Dell Technologies released a backup and restore feature for OpenManage Enterprise and plugins. This feature is a more convenient way of backing up OME, because it enables an administrator to do so without the need for hypervisor snapshots. One can now back up the entire appliance configuration and data, including managed device information, custom groups, and discovery jobs such as the discovery task, alert policies, installed plugin data, and logs.
A backup task can be scheduled to run daily, weekly, or immediately. Backup administrator rights are required to execute these tasks. When backing up, administrators are required to provide a security passphrase. This is used as a security measure because during a restore, administrators are challenged for the passphrase, and data is restored only when there is a match.
The backup task supports HTTPS, CIFS, or NFS network shares as a target destination and the backup is encrypted to ensure the security of the appliance configuration data. (Note that the appliance is in a maintenance state during the backup, all new task scheduling is suspended, and no operations can be performed on the console during this time.)
In the unfortunate event of a deletion, corruption, or system failure, the restore capabilities of OpenManage Enterprise are easy. If required, data can be restored to the existing or a new instance of OpenManage Enterprise running the same version, using the same or larger sized virtual appliance.
This backup & restore capability for appliance data is a major feature to enhance the resilience of the OpenManage Enterprise management solution.
Resources
Learn more at: Support for Dell OpenManage Enterprise
Author: Mark Maclean, PowerEdge Technical Marketing Engineering
Contributors: Manoj Malhotra, Product Manager; Pushkala Iyer, Product Planner