Dell Management Console 2.0 – What a Crap!
Originally I thought we are going to have a small footprint and easy managed software finally arrived from Dell, but I was wrong totally.
After spending hours and hours of trying to install DMC 2.0 on Physical and VM, both failed multiple times, I finally gave up. It was a buggy software and not to mention the size of it (over 1GB) and the bunch of crap modules it’s trying to load to your server (there are more than 80 stages during the installation).
I would strongly recommend everyone with a common sense to avoid using this product even it’s free of charge. Simply because it’s way over complicated and the pre-requirement can make anyone big headache, took over 1 hour to install on latest hardware server and finally failed during installation!
I would rather use PRTG as the tool for my monitoring purpose and I was hoping DMC can do me only one thing (hardware failure alert), now I will skip it forever and never look back, I will depend on vCenter’s hardware monitoring and iDRAC’s alert to help me to achieve the same goal.
Bye Bye DMC 2.0, the crappiest software I’ve ever encountered since MS Commerce Server back then.
I’ve got to tell you, I loved this post! Very humorous. I have been waiting for Altiris 7.1 and DMC 2.0 for a while now, been looking around for any information about it and found your post. The problem you describe sounds similar to others I have seen. Altiris is a complicated product, and it seems Dell is trying tio leverage it so they don’t have to build their own tool, even though they purchased Kace and now own an Altiris competitor.
For you I might recommend you try the Dell vCenter plug-in, it lets you manage your Dell ESX hosts right through vCenter. And you could also keep using the Dell IT Assistant, although it doesn’t have all the capability of DMC, it will monitor your Dell servers, and can also be an SNMP trap.
Thanks for dropping by, actually I was really pissed that night and wrote the above. The installation was on a clean installed W2K8 R2 with MSSQL 2008 R2 Express, and it just kept failing, I did read that long Readme.txt, but it won’t help me going anywhere, I really wonder why would people use such a complicated software in the first place.
I’ve also looked vCenter Plugin, there is a latest update on DellTechCenter, seemed it’s also buggy and the pre-requirement is almost equal to DMC, well close, so I will wait till version 2.0 to be released later.
Yup, I am going to give Dell IT Assistant a try later, install in a VM and connect to OpenManage portgroup and receive those SNMP trap from the hosts.
Finally, I really don’t understand why Dell couldn’t make OpenManage better by adding email alert to complete it instead of using ITA or DMC to get trap and then get alert.
We are using the 1.x vcenter plug-in…it is a virtual appliance and the install was easy, the only problem I had was the cimagent portion of the OMSA was not installed, so I had to re-run the install with the -c option…not explained very well in the install instructions but after that the plug-in found my ESX hosts and inventory and monitoring is successful. You can also use it for bare-metal deployment of hosts, something I’ll look at in the future.
Something to remember with ITA, last time I checked, it still only worked on a 32-bit server.
Dell Server Administrator version 6.4.0 can be configured to send emails without using the ITA console. Under preferences.General Settings, never used it that way only with ITA management console. When installing the OpenManage ITA console it will only run on WS03R2 and with SQL 2005, 32 bit. I tried with dell onsite to get the DMC 1.1.1 installed and running it failed super complicated and buggy. We reverted back to the last version of OpenManage. I was planning to try DMC 2.0 but it does not sound like it has changed much from the 1.1.1 version.
Thanks, I’ve configured the SMTP email server in OMSA 6.4, but it’s not what it mean to.
It is actually used for “E-mails the contents of this window to your designated recipient. See the Server Administrator User’s Guide for instructions about configuring your Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server.”
Btw, does ITA require R2 of w2k3 or just normal w2k3 is also fine?
Finally, I just found this useful link
http://www.tachytelic.net/2010/03/setting-up-e-mail-alerts-from-dell-openmanage-omsa/
However, I still think ITA will be my permanent solution as SNMP trap is the proper way to get email alert, besides, I don’t particularly like adding external script to each of my Dell box.
Btw, I finally got the latest ITA 8.8 working on W2K3 Web and MSSQL 2008 R2 Express, it does working but need some tweak, see my other post.
Btw, starting ITA 8.8 on up, you can install IT Assistant management station on these 64-bit operating systems like W2K8 and R2.