White Paper

Dell KACE and OpenManage Essentials
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 System Monitoring and Fault Resolution—The Dell OpenManage Essentials toolset provides
active system monitoring via SNMP and IPMI, and delivers issues that have been identified for
remediation to the Dell|KACE service desk for ownership assignment and resolution.
 Reporting on Data Center Assets and Activities—Extensive reporting capabilities are provided to
track progress and validate processes.
Inventorying and managing data center assets
The automation of inventory data collection is an essential first step in proactively managing data
center assets. Since change is constant, this task must be performed consistently and on a regular basis
to reflect an accurate baseline of the systems under management. While both OpenManage Essentials
and the Dell|KACE K1000 Appliance can discover devices on the network using ICMP and SNMP, far
richer capabilities for servers are enabled by deploying agent software to the operating systems
running on Dell PowerEdge™ Servers. For OpenManage Essentials this agent is the OpenManage Server
Administrator (OMSA) software. OMSA may be deployed to Windows, Linux, and ESX/ESXi platforms,
and provides a consistent interface across all of these.
The data collected into OpenManage Essentials inventory by OMSA details the various hardware
components and associated firmware and driver packages in the PowerEdge chassis, including model
and manufacturer information, relevant interface capabilities, and form factor data. Any changes that
occur due to field servicing would be reflected when new data is collected. Additionally, OME will
collect ICMP and SNMP data on other devices, such as storage arrays, network devices, printers, and
virtualization platforms for VMware and Microsoft®.
OpenManage Essentials inventory Figure 2.
For the Dell|KACE K1000 Appliance, the KAgent manages the required data collection for inventory,
and extends this collection into the software applications that are running on the platform. It is also
responsible for managing vulnerability assessment, patching, configuration, and deployment tasks for
the managed systems and their software. The Dell|KACE K1000 Appliance can also leverage the OMSA
agent provided by OpenManage to collect additional data and manage configurations for Dell servers
running Windows Server® 2000, 2003, and 2008, as well as Red Hat Linux 4 and 5. Information for other