Users Guide

● You can apply firmware updates on a single component of a device, or to the entire environment.
● If there are no applicable upgrades or downgrades for a device, performing a firmware update on the devices cause no action
on the devices.
● For updating chassis, see Updating CMC firmware section in Dell PowerEdge M1000e Chassis Management Controller
Firmware User’s Guide.
○ For updating chassis firmware in VRTX, see Updating firmware section in Dell Chassis Management Controller for Dell
PowerEdge VRTX User’s Guide.
○ For updating chassis firmware in FX2, see Updating firmware section in Dell Chassis Management Controller for Dell
PowerEdge FX2 User’s Guide.
1. In OMIMSSC, click Maintenance Center, select the servers or Modular System groups, and an update source, and then
click Run Update.
2. In Update Details, provide the firmware update job name and description.
3. To enable downgrading the firmware versions, select the Allow Downgrade check-box.
If this option is not selected, and then there is no action on the component that requires a firmware downgrade.
4. In Schedule Update, select one of the following:
● Run Now—select to apply the updates immediately.
● Select a date and time to schedule a firmware update in future.
5. Select any one of the following methods, and click Finish.
● Agent-free staged updates—updates that are applicable without a system restart are applied immediately, and the
updates that require a restart are applied when the system restarts. To check if all the updates are applied, refresh the
inventory. The entire update job fails, if the operation fails on even one device.
● Agent-free updates—updates are applied and the system restarts immediately.
NOTE: OMIMSSC supports only Agent-free updates for MX7000 Modular Systems.
NOTE: Cluster-Aware Updating (CAU)—automates the update process by using Windows CAU feature on cluster
update groups to maintain server's availability. Updates are passed to cluster update coordinator that is present on the
same system where the SCVMM server is installed. The update process is automated to maintain server's availability.
The update job is submitted to Microsoft Cluster-Aware-Update (CAU) feature, irrespective of the selection made from
the Update Method drop-down menu. For more information, see Updates using CAU.
NOTE: After submitting a firmware update job to iDRAC, OMIMSSC interacts with iDRAC for the status of the job and
displays it in the Jobs and Logs page in the OMIMSSC Admin Portal. If there is no response from iDRAC about the
status of the job for a long time, and then the status of the job is marked as failed.
Updates using CAU
Updates on servers (that are part of cluster) happen through cluster update coordinator which is present on the same system
where SCVMM server is installed. The updates are not staged and are applied immediately. Using Cluster Aware Update (CAU),
you can minimize any disruption or server downtime enabling continuous availability of the workload. Hence, there is no impact
to the service provided by the cluster group. For more information about CAU, see Cluster-Aware Updating Overview section at
technet.microsoft.com.
Before applying the updates on cluster update groups, verify the following:
● Ensure that the enrolled user has administrator privileges for updating clusters through CAU feature.
● Connectivity to selected update source.
● Availability of failover clusters.
● Check for cluster update readiness and ensure that there are no major errors and warnings in the Cluster Readiness report
for applying the CAU method. For more information about CAU, see Requirements and Best Practices for Cluster—aware
Updating section at Technet.microsoft.com.
● Ensure that Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 2016 or Windows 2019 operating system is
installed on all failover cluster nodes to support the CAU feature.
● Configuration of automatic updates is not enabled to automatically install updates on any failover cluster node.
● Enable firewall rule that enables remote shutdown on each node in the failover cluster.
● Ensure that the cluster group has minimum of two nodes.
NOTE:
● For information about applying the updates, see Upgrading and downgrading firmware versions using run update method .
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Firmware update in OMIMSSC