The Strickland Group » Dell and XenServer

Dell and XenServer - So Happy Together

Published July 14 at 2:00 PM by David Shoffitt

With all of the new features of XenServer 5.6, I have been very excited about rolling it out. There has been one thing though. OpenManage and XenServer haven't been the best pals. When we had been trying to rollout any XenServer on a Dell Server, it seems that we had to jump through hoops to make OpenManage work. Well Dell has really worked on being more XenServer Friendly and released a Supplemental Pack for XenServer.

A Supplemental Pack is an install package that can be slipstreamed into the install of XenServer. So if you were installing XenServer you would simply start with the install CD, then use the Linux Templates Supplemental CD, and then use the Dell OpenManage CD when it asks for you to continue the install. It is great!

I had to call Dell to get a copy of the ISO because it was not yet available on the website. Here is the link so that you too can enjoy some Dell and Citrix Xen!

http://ftp.dell.com/sysman/OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-LX-6.3.0-2075.XenServer56_A00.10.iso

By the way, Thank You! Johanness Far (Dell Enterprise Technical Support Senior Analyst) for getting me the link.

Entry Tags: operating systems, free, monitoring, cloud, technology, citrix, remote, Dell

Comments

Posted by Marco on 7/14/2010 7:37:07 PM - CST

Hi David,
What machine are you using? I'm using a PE2950 (II) - 9G hardware and am having issues with 'dsm_sa_datamgrd' segfaulting. I've been working on this issue with Ent support for a day now ... they cannot reproduce this issue in the lab, however I've successfully reproduced this on 3 identical machines. :(

Posted by David Shoffitt on 7/15/2010 11:42:59 AM - CST

I have installed on a PowerEdge 2970 (AMD Architecture). By next week, I will be installing on a 2950, and I will repost about my results.

Posted by Marco on 7/15/2010 6:03:28 PM - CST

Dell has confirmed and replicated the issue now.
PE2950 (II gen - 9G). Once they added the additional NIC card my machine has in it, they see the same issue. Dual Port Server NIC - Originally ordered and provided by Dell 82571EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller I am now also seeing segfaults of multipathd ... that's a bit concerning! BTW, the 2970 isn't supported by Dell for OMSA 6.3 for XenServer. Source: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smsom/6.3/en/peosom/installa.htm#wp999358

Posted by David Shoffitt on 7/15/2010 10:07:23 PM - CST

I spoke with Dell about a month ago on the supported versions of OMSA on specific servers and they cleared up the mud a little bit on this. The reason it is not supported is because they did not test on the AMD architecture. Upon speaking with a different Dell technician about this he explained that it doesn't mean that it will not work, it just means that they do not guarantee that it will work.

Trackback on 7/17/2010 5:59:52 AM - CST

Install Dell OpenManage 6.1 / omsa / omreport into Citrix XenServer dom0 | Slog - Carl Heaton

Posted by jemmille on 7/17/2010 11:17:18 AM - CST

Worked great for me. Thanks for this.

Posted by Franz on 9/24/2010 7:18:00 AM - CST

Hello,
we had the same problem width Open manage 6.2 and Xenserver 5.6. Then we installed Dell Open Manage 6.3 on Xenserver 5.6 . But it didnt worked until we updated the firmware of the following components: - DRAC - PERC5/i - BIOS - Backplane - Network After updating the network card everithing worked fine. maybe it was only necessary to update the NIC-Firmware.