Dell - Dell Linux - Hardware Monitoring

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) is the suite of tools provided by Dell for managing an individual server. See the official OpenManage site for product information.

Obtaining OMSA

OMSA is included with the purchase of every new PowerEdge server. It comes on a CD included in the server's cardboard box.

Each new version of OMSA may be also downloaded from support.dell.com. Search for Files by Description: "OpenManage Server Administrator linux"

The Dell unofficial yum repository also carries OMSA to ease installation.

OMSA 5.0 and above

OMSA 5.0 is released!.
Starting with OMSA 5.0, all necessary kernel components are now fully open source, GPL licensed, and included in kernel.org 2.6.x. This includes the OpenIPMI drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi* drivers, drivers/firmware/dell_rbu Remote BIOS Update driver, and drivers/firmware/dcdbas Dell Base Systems Management driver. This should make it much easier to install and run OMSA on a variety of Linux distributions (userspace library incompatibilities, if any, notwithstanding).
OMSA 5.0 has full support for:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 6 or higher
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 plus Updates
- Novell/SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Service Pack 3 or higher
Unofficial: There's a Live CD of CentOS 4.4 plus OMSA 5.1 available.
Unofficial: There's a Live CD of CentOS 4.3 plus OMSA 5.0 available.

OMSA for Novell/SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

OMSA 4.x isn't officially supported by Dell on Novell/SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9. However, we have made available builds of OMSA 4.4 that work on SuSE (with the exception of the web server and online diagnostics components). These builds are available here.

OMSA Tips and Tricks

Installation may fail if your kernel sources are not available in the expected place. You can make installation succeed if you make /usr/src/linux-2.4 a symlink to your actual kernel source location.
OMSA 1.5 has a check to prevent installation on RHEL 2.1 ES (which hasn't been tested by the OMSA team, though the code is identical to that of 2.1 AS). This test was removed in OMSA 1.6. If you must run OMSA 1.5 on RHEL 2.1 ES, change /etc/redhat-release from saying "ES" to say "AS" and install OMSA, then switch it back.
OpenManage Server Administrator 1.4 - OMSA 1.4 fixed the "ntp time skew" problem reported on the linux-poweredge mailing list.
OpenManage Server Administrator 1.2 - With OMSA 1.2 or earlier, if you have difficulty rebuilding the source code shim because of an error in including <linux/malloc.h>, you may change that line to include <linux/slab.h> instead and it will work.

IPMI

Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) is a standards-based method of obtaining information such as fan speeds, temperatures, voltages, System Event Log entries, and the like. Dell x6xx and newer systems implement IPMI controllers, either as Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs), or on add-in Dell Remote Assistant Controller (DRAC) cards.

Dell engineers are active contributors to several Open Source IPMI projects, as well as participate in the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) standards organization.

Dell IPMI implementations by platform
IPMI drivers for RHEL3, RHEL4, and SLES9 in DKMS format.
IPMI tools

User Contributions

Management Addons

Pauli Borodulin has created .debs (Debian) for OMSA 4.4, with instructions on how to build and use them. They can be downloaded here:
- http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/debian/omsa4.4/ (right-click on the individual files, and do Save Link As)
Sven Hergenhahn created a live CD based on Knoppix 3.4 that allows you to run Dell OpenManage directly from the CD. There are two flavors:
- One is a full featured Knoppix CD with KDE and almost all recovery tools (614 MB)
- the other is a stripped down version that still offers numerous tools, but has been shrinked to 300 MB for slower connections. Nothing needs to be installed on the harddisks and no drives get mounted writeble by default, so you can safely use this CD, it will not destroy anything. Download from:
  - United States: linux.dell.com
  - Germany (thanks to Eberhard Moenkeberg):
    - ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/dell/omsa-knoppix/
    - http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/dell/omsa-knoppix/
    - rsync://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/dell/omsa-knoppix/
Wouter Coppens has posted an ebuild of OMSA 4.5 for Gentoo.
Martin List-Peterson has created .debs (Debian) for OMSA 1.7. Download dellomsa and dellomsa-drivers.
Dirk Wetter posted an MRTG file to monitor the temperatures of a PowerEdge 1550.
Jason Andrade posted an OMSA 1.0 install script to help automate the process.
Dell's Custom Solutions team provided instructions and scripts to convert OpenMange RPMs into Debian packages (debs).
Brecht Samyn took those instructions and made them into .debs (dellomsa-*4.71-3653_i386.deb).
Adam Newby generated OMSA 1.4 .debs (dellomsa-*-4.90-3825_i386.deb).
Joshua Giles wrote an article for Dell PowerSolutions magazine on Integrating OpenNMS with OpenManage Server Agent to Manage Dell PowerEdge Servers running Linux.
Harold van Oostrom has announced his PowerEdge::RAC perl package for managing your DRAC, ERA, and ERA/O without using OMSA.
Ulrich Hochholdinger created debs of afaapps, OMSA, and racadm.
Eberhard Moenkeberg has a web page about running OpenManage on SuSE distributions.