Over the past few days I have been working on getting Dell OpenManage Essentials up and running on our new network. The installation was pretty straightforward and well documented by Dell, but I did run into a few issues that I had to dig through forum posts to find the answers to.

Before I begin, you’ll want to reference Dell’s OME homepage for the software. There are some great videos and whitepapers that walk you through the installation and usage basics.

Now on to the good stuff:

1. I wasn’t able to get the configuration of SNMP working through Group Policy per the Dell tutorials. When I followed Dell’s instructions, the Traps tab of the SNMP Service tab had the community set to public and I could not change it. Since I was using a custom community name, this wouldn’t work for me. If there is a way to set that via the GPO, I’d love to hear it, because I ended up configuring it per server. My guess is it would need to be configured with a GPO policy and some registry entries set in the GPO preferences.

   Dell’s video on configuring Window’s SNMP clients is pretty solid, but here are the settings you should configure (keep in mind I have SNMP restricted to the server running OME).

   

2. OME can also handle traps for ESXi servers using WS-Man. If you reference to the Dell website I listed above, you can download the addon for ESXi.

   I ran into an issue where the ESXi box I installed the software on was not reporting to the OME server. Thanks to a Dell forum poster, my problem was solved. Apparently ESXi 5+ requires a timeout greater than the default. I set my to 10 and all was good in the world. Below is a screenshot of the settings required for WS-Man to work with the ESXi addin.

   

3. Finally, there will be some traps from ESXi that come up as undefined. Don’t waste time trying to import ESXi MIBs (like I did), because OME won’t let you overwrite the predefined MIBs. According to Dell the new MIBs will be incorporated in an update set for Q3 or Q4 2012.

The lesson I took from this little project was that OME is still very new and there are some minor bugs to work out. Overall the software is put together really well and the documentation is the best I have ever come across.