So, to get the ball rolling, let’s install the Windows component on a management machine that has access to the host management VMkernel ports, download the OM Managed Node installer ↗ from above and extract on your management box, navigate to extraction and run setup.exe, we want to see that the box we’re installing it on supports the Web Server role: The OpenManage Web Server ↗ (provides a windows-based web GUI for ESXi VIB agents).An OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter ‘.ova’ ↗ (provides vCenter plugin).A VIB ↗ to be deployed to each ESXi host (you have vUM ↗ installed ↗, right?).OpenManage for vSphere is three discrete piece of software: Luckily for me (totally based purchasing decisions around this) Dell have an offering called OpenManage, it’s been in their line up for a very long time, but it’s gone and gotten all modern and has a vCenter plugin and ESXi VIB installers for info gathering and reporting to the plugin. I can see, in my normal operating environment, if there are hardware problems, have it trigger vMotion events, send up vCenter alarms, update firmware, all sorts of cool stuff - who doesn’t want this? It makes sense to try and integrate hardware infrastructure with the virtualisation infrastructure as much as possible, “single pane of glass” management is very much the thing at the moment, mainly because it makes life easier. It’s mostly based on Dell hardware it’s cheap on eBay, I like their management tools and in the past i’ve only really had good experiences with them, granted it’s no Cisco UCS, HP Bladesystem or Dell M1000e - I think with the addition of OpenManage, and in particular OMIVV it makes it almost as manageable as those environments when you get the foundations laid down nice and solid. So essentially, this is my first REAL lab.
I say “new”, the last one was a single R710 with a ReadyNas Ultra 6 attached. If you’ve been reading my other posts of late, you will have gathered I’ve been building a new lab.