OpenManage Enterprise contains features that enable administrators to perform tasks that aren’t possible to do with some earlier versions of the software. We tested these features and verified that they function as we describe below.
- With multi-homing, administrators can connect OpenManage Enterprise to public and out-of- band networks simultaneously, enabling them to concurrently manage test and production servers without needing to switch networks. This feature is available only for OpenManage Enterprise versions 3.3 and higher.
- New to OpenManage Enterprise 3.4 is server-initiated discovery. Dell EMC provides the option for new servers to ship with unique login credentials for enhanced security. Server-initiated discovery in OpenManage Enterprise 3.4 provides a method to discover these servers without needing to scan the network for each new server using complex, unique management credentials. This could potentially decrease deployment time and prevent human error.
- OpenManage Enterprise also has thermal event detection capabilities, and allowed us to set power policies for thermal budgeting. Every 15 minutes, OpenManage Enterprise checks each target server in the thermal-managed group. If it detects servers running an abnormally high temperature, it can use event- triggering to place those servers in a low-power state to cool them down, which could prevent damage to critical internal components.
We measured the time and effort required to complete each of these tasks and show our findings below (Table 1).
Table 1: Time and steps required to complete each task.
Source: Principled Technologies