Dell DSET and ESXi 5.5

A colleague of mine, one whom was attempting to troubleshoot some issues with Dell support was asking about the possiblity of gathering a DSET report on one of our hosts.  DSET, or the Dell Server E-Support Tool is used to gather hardware, storage, and OS support information which consolidates into a single zip file which is used by support to troubleshoot and inventory your Dell Poweredge servers.  Needless to say, DSET was pretty similar in the Windows/Physical world – simply install on the local OS, run the command and you are done.

In ESXi this becomes a little trickier.  In fact, after reading up on some documentation I was somewhat reluctant, as it requires that the Dell OpenManageServer Administration bundle be installed on your host.  In the past I’ve found myself fighting with Dell OpenManage and Server Administrator bundles as well as their remote counterparts.  Seeing that only certain versions work with certain ESXi releases, and having to match up versioning numbers exactly to make things function properly.  That, and the fact that every time I seem to hit Dell’s support site there are new releases really make things, well, let’s say troublesome (or annoying).

Nonetheless I gave it a shot and after enough experimentation I found a combination that worked – so, in case you’re having the same issues maybe this will help.

First up, OpenManage

So, first we need to install the OpenManageServer Administrator Bundle version 7.4 – you can find that located here.  Go ahead and download the zip file and extract to /var/log/vmware on your host.  Yes, the package will look for that specific path so you will need to be sure it is in /var/log/vmware.  From there we can simply install the vib with the following command

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esxcli software vib install -v /var/log/vmware/cross_dell-openmanage-esxi_7.4.ESXi550-0000.vib
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Next – DSET

The version of DSET that we will install is 3.6.  The installation for DSET is the standard Next Next type of install – so I won’t go over much of that – just be sure to select both the CIM provider and the collector.  You can find it here.   Once done you are good to go.  Launch a command shell (as administrator) and browse to c:\Program Files(x86)\Dell\AdvDiags\DSET\bin and run the DellSystemInfo.exe command with your desired parameters (example below)

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c:\Program Files(x86)\Dell\AdvDiags\DSET\bin\DellSystemInfo.exe -s IP_OF_Host -u root -d hw -n root/dcim/sysman -r C:\DSET.zip
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There you go!  Your Dell DSET log that you can now forward off to support to get your issues looked after.  This certainly isn’t a very difficult thing to do but troublesome nonetheless trying to match up versions to make things work.  Anyways, hope it helps with anyone having issues.