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.
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.
CSIOR must be enabled. Additionally, before initiating Auto Discovery,
to make sure that retrieved data is current, the system must be completely
powered off and then back on (hard reboot).
Dell servers can be ordered with Auto Discovery and handshake
options pre-configured by the factory. If a server is not pre-configured
with these options, you must manually enter the Dell Management Plug-In
IP address or configure your local network to provide this information.
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.