Users Guide

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 specific hardware support information.
●
The server must have the minimum supported versions of iDRAC firmware, Lifecycle controller and BIOS. See the Dell
Management Plug- in for VMWare vCenter Release Notes for specific hardware support information.
NOTE: If the firmware versions are outdated, a two step upgrade process could be required. See the firmware
documentation for detailed upgrade instructions.
● The Dell Management Plug-in supports deployment using only embedded/integrated LOMs. You can configure 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 configuration, then make sure the following conditions are met prior
to initiating hypervisor deployment:
○ Enable the VT (Virtualization Technology) flag 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 configuration, the BIOS setting for VT is automatically enabled, even if
BIOS configuration is not part of the hardware profile. Express/Clone RAID configuration 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 configures 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 find 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.
Topics:
• Provisioning Overview
• Understanding Deployment Job Times
• Server States Within The Deployment Sequence
• Downloading Custom Dell ISO Images
• Understanding How To Configure A Hardware Profile
• About Managing Hardware Profiles
• Creating A New Hypervisor Profile
• Managing Hypervisor Profiles
• Building A New Deployment Template
• Running The Deployment Wizard
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 Profile
Contains the hardware settings gathered from a reference server that is used to deploy new servers. See
Creating A New Hardware Profile.
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