Users Guide

5
Hardware Prerequisites
To successfully perform hardware provisioning and deployment, the physical servers must appear in the Deployment Wizard. All
physical servers must meet the following prerequisites:
• See the Dell Management Plug-In for VMWare vCenter Release Notes for specic hardware support information.
• The server must have the minimum supported versions of iDRAC rmware, Lifecycle controller and BIOS. See the Dell
Management Plug- in for VMWare vCenter Release Notes for specic hardware support information.
NOTE: If the rmware versions are outdated, a two step upgrade process could be required. See the rmware
documentation for detailed upgrade instructions.
• The Dell Management Plug-in supports deployment using only embedded/integrated LOMs. You can congure NICs in PCI slots
manually after the deployment. If using add-on NICs, the system must have the host LOMs enabled.
• The Dell Management Plug-in allows deployment onto Internal Dual SD Module (hypervisor only) or local hard drives. Before you
install hypervisor to an Internal Dual SD Module, it must have a maximum of 1 or 2 GB of storage. The Internal Dual SD Module
must be enabled from BIOS before you deploy the hypervisor with the Dell Management Plug-in. You can change the
management NIC manually, and add the system to vCenter.
• If the iDRAC is in dedicated mode, its NIC must be enabled to communicate with the Dell Management Plug-in.
• If the Dell Management Plug-in is not used for hardware conguration, then make sure the following conditions are met prior to
initiating hypervisor deployment:
– Enable the VT (Virtualization Technology) ag in the BIOS.
– Set the system's boot order to either a bootable Virtual Disk or an Internal Dual SD Module for operating system installation.
• If the Dell Management Plug-in is used for hardware conguration, the BIOS setting for VT is automatically enabled, even if BIOS
conguration is not part of the hardware prole. Express/Clone RAID conguration is required if a virtual disk is not already
present on the target system.
• If your servers are from versions prior to 12G, then the deployment process installs the OpenManage Server Administrator
package on the target system, and automatically congures the SNMP trap destination to point to the Dell Management Plug-in.
• Custom ESXi images that contain all the Dell drivers are required for deployment. You can nd the correct images by going to the
Dell Drivers & Downloads page and saving the custom images to a location you can access during the deployment process. For
the most up-to date list of supported ESXi versions for this release, see the Release Notes.
Provisioning Overview
Once a physical inventory of the datacenter is complete, all discovered bare-metal systems are available to the OpenManage
Integration for VMware vCenter for zero touch hardware provisioning and hypervisor deployment. To prepare for provisioning and
deployment, you must:
Create a Hardware
Prole
Contains the hardware settings gathered from a reference server that is used to deploy new servers. See
Creating A New Hardware Prole.
Create a Hypervisor
Prole
Contains the hypervisor installation information needed for ESXi deployment. See Creating A New
Hypervisor Prole.
Create a
Deployment
Template
Optionally contains a hardware prole, a hypervisor prole, or both. You can save and reuse these proles as
needed for all available datacenter servers. See Building Deployment Templates.
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