[dedicated thread] Dell Open Manage Appliance

pctechsolution

@AtaxyaNetwork Thank you. Let me know anyway I can help or test. Im not sure about needing a second disk.

joncuddy

@AtaxyaNetwork
Thank you for providing these instructions. I tried this awhile back in January and it looked very promising, but I ended up getting stuck with similar problems like those listed above. I was checking this thread to see if there was an update, so it's somewhat nice to see I'm not the only one struggling with this.

We do have a support contract with Dell except they won't budge from there position. I went back and forth with my rep for a couple months with "best effort" but ultimately I was told XCP-ng is not a supported hypervisor. The old version on 3.x still works, so I'm stuck with that.

Hopefully others are asking Dell to add support for XCP-ng. I'll continue to watch this space for an update. Thanks again for your efforts.

olivierlambert

Thanks @joncuddy

We have to get back to Dell with a very large customer to change their mind. Catch 22 issue, but we have more and more (very) large customers, so this will change.

@stormi we need to note that somewhere internally and monitor the opportunity to get back to Dell with a deal big enough to change their mind.

flakpyro

I'd love to see support added for XCP-NG by Dell as well. I also run Lenovo xClarity Administrator and their appliance works in XCP-NG without any modification!

AtaxyaNetwork

@joncuddy @TheNorthernLight @pctechsolution

I have a new version available !

What's changed:

Fixed disk detection
CPU/RAM is correctly detected
I was able to install and uninstall some plugins (Power Manager, Integration for VMware Center, Operation Manager)
Network is configured with DHCP by default
Added the guest-tools !

To do:

Try to hack the grub password (because it's fun)
Have more feedback to tackle the last bugs (I know my fixes is not perfect)
Have Dell official support

Ping me if you want the appliance, I'll send you a link with the password !
I'll try to use it with my 3 R630 machines to do further tests

@olivierlambert can we change the topic title to something more accurate ?
Since it became the OME megathread

olivierlambert

On it, thanks for your work @AtaxyaNetwork

TheNorthernLight

@AtaxyaNetwork This is fantastic!
What remaining last bugs are you aware of?

AtaxyaNetwork

@TheNorthernLight guest-tools and SELinux, I bypass it, but it's not the best case I can achieve. I am working on a better fix

archw

@flakpyro
I'd love to see what you did!
On the GRUB password thing, I cheated and opened it with another instance os SLES and jacked around with the menus from a working system. I tried a million things but could never get the tools installation to work!

Mount up basically any linux installer or system rescue ISO.
Boot into that (If using SLES, go to other options and select "RESCUE MODE" and wait).... get a shell...
This will let you ssh into it
sudo ssh-keygen -A
sudo service ssh --full-restart
ip addr # so I can know how to get in from putty
cat $PATH
passwd (makes a new password so you can ssh inot it)
/sbin/sshd

lvdisplay
mkdir -p /mnt/sysimage/boot
mount /dev/xvda2 /mnt/sysimage/boot
mount /dev/OMCAppVG/LVRoot /mnt/sysimage
mount -t proc none /mnt/sysimage/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount -o bind /run /mnt/sysimage/run
/mnt/sysimage
for x in sys proc run dev tmp; do mount --bind /$x /mnt/sysimage/$x; done
chroot /mnt/sysimage

I saw these instructions somone where but I coudl not figure out these steps ?

8 ) Enable root logins in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Enable sshd via: systemctl enable sshd
Set a temporary password for root via passwd
Exit the chroot and the installer/rescue image... let it boot back into OME
Cache your ssh key in root's keystore via whatever method you like... my preferred is ssh-copy-id
Remove root's temporary password...

flakpyro

So testing the appliance and here is what i have encountered so far:

Boots up no problem, XO sees tools installed and all stats work.

It took me two attempts to upgrade it to 4.4.0.75, the first attempt failed, i reverted a snapshot from before trying and upon trying again it was successful.

However i can no longer install / update plugins, back to throwing disk space capacity errors. I'm guessing whatever was modified in the appliance you shared was reverted by the update which now causes it to think there is no disk space again.