White Papers

Dell IT Assistant Migration To OpenManage Essentials

Executive summary

Dell OpenManage Essentials (OME) is designed and implemented to replace the legacy Dell IT Assistant

product. It provides easy migration from your existing Dell IT Assistant (ITA) instance to OpenManage

Essentials in the following two scenarios.

 Same-box migration: Lets you upgrade from your existing Dell IT Assistant instance with

its user settings to OpenManage Essentials as part of the OpenManage Essentials

installation on the same system. The previously existing Dell IT Assistant installation is

not available following the upgrade.

 Off-box migration: Lets you set up a different OpenManage Essentials instance on a

different system, and then moves user settings and data from the existing Dell IT

Assistant to the new OpenManage Essentials. The existing Dell IT Assistant installation

continues to work during the migration process until the new OpenManage Essentials is

installed and tested in the production environment.

This whitepaper guides you through these two migration scenarios.

Introduction

OpenManage Essentials is a hardware management application that provides a comprehensive view of

Dell systems, devices, and components in the enterprise’s network. OpenManage Essentials is a Web-

based and one-to-many systems management application. Using OpenManage Essentials, you can

discover and inventory Dell systems and other devices and components, monitor system health, and

perform system updates.

Off-box migration from Dell IT Assistant to OpenManage

Essentials

To perform an off-box migration from Dell IT Assistant to OpenManage Essentials:

1. Back up your existing Dell IT Assistant database (see Backing up your Dell IT Assistant database,

below).

2. Copy the backup database to the system on which you plan to install OpenManage Essentials.

3. Restore your database (see Restoring your Dell IT Assistant database, below).

4. Make sure that the restored database is named ITAssist.

5. Install OpenManage Essentials.

Backing up your Dell IT Assistant database

1. Log in to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio either as server administrator, or as a user

with sysadmin rights.

2. Right-click your ITAssist database.