One note about discovery of ESXi 5.0 servers with Dell OpenManage Essentials

Even though we’re using the Dell Management Plug-in for vCenter, we use Dell’s OpenManage Essentials (OME) for physical boxes. I want to be able to view ESXi server info from OME, as well, though. After initial configuration, my ESXi servers were showing up as “Unknown” even though they were correctly categorized as “VMware ESX Servers” in OME. This irritated me because I had finally configured my physical servers to show nice green check marks to show all was well but I couldn’t get my ESXi boxes to play nicely. As the ESXi boxes sat as unknown, they also did not have detailed hardware inventories available.

Now, I’ve been unimpressed by Dell’s hardware management platform so far even though the idea of it promises to be a big time saver and monitoring tool. When I have it configured, not only will I get SNMP hardware monitoring, but I should be able to upgrade firmwares and BIOSs remotely. Mostly, I’ve been dissatisfied by the lack of clear and organized configuration steps for, what I consider to be, a pretty standard data center: mostly virtualized with a few physical servers scattered about. As a note, I haven’t yet configured Dell’s management and monitoring stack to keep track of our remote office hardware, but it’s on the list of things to do.

Real quick, let me show you what I’ve come up with.

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