White Papers

Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter: Discovery of Dell Bare-Metal Servers
5
Executive summary
The Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter is a virtual appliance that streamlines tools and tasks
associated with the management and deployment of Dell servers in your virtual environment. It
reduces complexity by natively integrating the key management capabilities into the VMware vCenter
console. It enables and speeds up bare metal provisioning from within vCenter and minimizes risk with
hardware alarms, streamlined firmware updates, and provides deep visibility into inventory, health,
and warranty details.
Discovery is the process of adding a Dell PowerEdge 11
th
or 12
th
Generation bare-metal server into a
pool of available servers for use by the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. Once a server is
discovered, you can use it for hypervisor and hardware deployment. This white paper provides
sufficient information about discovery to assist you in decision making for server purchasing, system
configuration, and provides references to more detailed information on the specific topics covered.
Having a strong understanding of the features and requirements surrounding the purchasing,
configuration, and the overall discovery process reduces time and effort in the administrative functions
necessary to bring new servers online, and for achieving a successful implementation of security
features important to your organization. An example of this would be leveraging the ordering system to
use an Auto-Discovery SKU so servers can ship pre-configured to announce them once cabled.
Introduction
This white paper briefly discusses manually discovering servers into the Dell Management Plug-in for
VMware vCenter, and discusses Auto-Discovery. The Auto-Discovery section outlines the requirements
for adding servers to the Dell Management Plug-in, discusses the processes available to reduce
administrative effort, and provides information about how to configure your environment for Auto-
Discovery.
Prerequisites
Before attempting to discover Dell PowerEdge 11
th
or 12
th
Generation bare-metal servers, first follow
the installation instructions for the Dell Plug-in for VMware vCenter. Only Dell PowerEdge 11
th
Generation or later servers with iDRAC express or iDRAC enterprise can be discovered into the Dell
Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter’s pool of bare-metal servers. Network connectivity from the
Dell bare-metal server’s iDRAC to the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter’s virtual machine is
required.
NOTE: Hosts with existing hypervisors should not be discovered into the Dell Management Plug-in for
VMware vCenter, instead they should be added to the vCenter, added to a connection profile, and then
reconciled with the Dell Management Plug-in using the Host Compliance Wizard.