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With ESX/ESXi is possible have several information from the physical hardware (with CIM) and this could be enough in most cases, especially for monitoring (with hardware health) and to gain some inventory info (like the Service Tag of a server).

But for some specific tasks (like a RAID rebuild o check of the local storage, or have a detailed inventory of the physical RAM banks) is necessary use the specific native tool from the hardware vendor. For Dell servers, the tool is called OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) and the current version is 6.5. It is available for several platforms of operating systems (in case of physical servers) or hypervisors (included VMware ESX/ESXi, XenServer and Hyper-V).

For vSphere 5 it’s already available a preliminar and working version (but is not yet included in the official repository):

The related document describe the detail on how manually install OMSA with the CLI. But I’ve try to write a different procedure to install it with VUM. If you have vCenter Server and VUM è you only have to follow this steps:

1. Import the downloaded file (as-as, without open the ZIP file) inside the VUM path repository.

 

2. Now create a new baseline (it must be a Host Extension baseline) to include this patch.

 

3. Finally use the usual Scan and Remediation operations to install this component in an “orchestrated” way.

As the previous version of ESXi, this specific OMSA version is really minimal without the web server part (this was a big difference from the ESX version)… so you will need a server physical or virtual Windows (or maybe also Linux) with the full OMSA version installed that will act as a “proxy” web (note that the doc require at least 3 GB of RAM, but it can work also with less then 1GB).

Note also that there are some differences from the installation of OMSA on previous versions of ESX/ESXi: no firewall configuration is required (like on ESX) and there isn’t any Advanced Settings to change (like on previous ESXi).

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.