Users Guide

Benets of using iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller

The benets include:

• Increased availability — Early notication of potential or actual failures that help prevent a server failure or reduce recovery time after

failure.

• Improved productivity and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) — Extending the reach of administrators to larger number of distant

servers can make the IT sta more productive while driving down operational costs such as travel.

• Secure environment — By providing secure access to remote servers, administrators can perform critical management functions while

maintaining server and network security.

• Enhanced embedded management — Lifecycle Controller provides deployment and simplied serviceability through the LC GUI for

local deployment, Remote Services (wsman) interfaces for remote deployment integrated with Dell OpenManage Essentials and partner

consoles, and Redsh UI.

For more information on iDRAC, see the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller User’s Guide at dell.com/support/home. For more

information on wsman, see the Dell Lifecycle Controller GUI User’s Guide at delltechcenter.com/lc.

New in this release

The updates supported in this release are:

• Added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4 and 6.9

• Added support for SuSe Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12 SP2

• Added support for Dell EMC DSS 9500 and DSS 9250 servers

Key features

The key features of Lifecycle Controller are:

• Provisioning — Entire preoperating system conguration from a unied interface.

• Deploying — Simplied operating system installation with the embedded drivers on Lifecycle Controller. Unattended installation mode is

available for Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating systems.

• Download drivers for operating system installation from downloads.dell.com.

• Patching or updating — Operating system agnostic, and reduced maintenance downtime with direct access to updates from

downloads.dell.com. It simplies rmware updates by maintaining a working version for rollback.

• Servicing — Continuous availability of diagnostics without depending on a hard-disk drive. Ability to ash rmware automatically, while

replacing components such as a Dell PowerEdge storage controller, NIC, and power supply unit. Support for VLAN in network

conguration.

• System erase — Deletes the server and storage-related data on selected components of a server. You can delete information on BIOS,

Lifecycle Controller data (LC logs, conguration database and rollback rmware versions), iDRAC settings, and storage components on

the server.

NOTE

: You cannot delete the iDRAC license

le.

• Security — Support local key encryption.

• Enhanced Security — Support for TLS 1.2, 1.1, and 1.0. To enhance security, default setting is TLS 1.1 and higher.

• Restoring the server — Back up the server prole (including RAID conguration) and restore the server to a previously known state.

Importing a server license, rmware rollback, and restoring system conguration in case of system board replacement.

• Hardware inventory — Provides information about the current and factory system conguration.

• Lifecycle Controller logs for troubleshooting.

Introduction