Dell PowerEdge Updates for vSphere 5.5

If you haven’t kept your servers up to date and today decided to reboot into USC to update everything, you may be greeted with this nasty message “The updates you are trying to apply are not Dell-authorized updates”:

This is happening because your Lifecycle Controller (LFC) is out of date and most likely your iDRAC is too. Goody. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, hopefully what I will present here will be the easy way as well as possibly exposing you to a few new tools! I was unable to find a single definitive resource explaining what to do here so this summarizes my experience figuring out how to make these updates in my vSphere 5.5 environment.

For greater ease, I recommend using the legacy vSphere Client initially to set this up, especially if using VUM. Subsequent firmware updates will work fine via the web client once the recommended tools are in place.

The easy method:

1. Deploy the OpenManage integration appliance via OVF into vCenter (90-day eval): Link
   • Some helpful videos to assist with install if needed: link
2. Install the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) for your ESXi version, for 5.5: Link
   • This can be done via CLI or VUM, the latter is far simpler.
   • I was still unable to connect to the OMSA web page after install but the OM vCenter plugin will fix any OMSA issues.
3. In OM vCenter plugin, create connection profile, check hosts for compliance, fix CSIOR and OMSA in the tool.
   • Open the Dell Management Center from the vCenter home page:

• Create a connection profile, connect to your vSphere hosts and “Fix non-compliant vSphere Hosts” from the Compliance activity.

 

    4.  Once complete, switch over to Host and Clusters in vSphere Client, select host, OM integration tab, all data should be there now.

 

    5. Click firmware from the menu on the left and run the firmware update wizard.

• If your LFC is out of date you will see this:

Let the tool update it!

Once iDRAC and LFC are updated, you can now return to the UCS to run further updates or complete them via the OM vCenter plugin. The unauthorized updates message should be long gone.

The vCenter plugin is much more user friendly and will download, stage as well as manage the entrance/exit of maintenance mode.

Lastly, OM integration in vCenter is really quite nice and while not free is certainly something worth an investment consideration. The integrated summary view in the vSphere Web Client is much cleaner with relevant info, hardware health and tool links all on a single page.