iDRAC Enterprise out-of-band remote desktop

A quick call-out and notice of this Dell TechCenter session coming up this afternoon in 75-mins at 3pm Central time.

The TechCenter team will lead a chat session on a new feature of the Dell PowerEdge iDrac that allows VNC protocol for remote display to be added to the iDrac, can be used to remote view the host OS Console from a number of VNC devices including mobile devices with a VNC client. At some stage in the future this will also include innovative Dell WYSE pocketcloud client.

You can join the chat here at 3pm. Here is a longer document on what they’ll be talking about during the session.

Der Spiegel Article Regarding NSA TAO Organization

As I know from search engine referrals to my blog a lot of readers arrive here for searches on firmware, open source and security, I thought it worth adding a link to point to the official Dell Corporate response to the current concerns on the Der Spiegel report.

This mirrors and was my experience.

Configure PowerEdge Servers with iDRAC and XML

For those still reading from my days in the firmware, PowerEdge development team. Peter Tsai and the TechCenter team are hosting a chat later today on the The Dell iDRAC7 (Dell Remote Access Controller) ability to allow you to configure and manage Dell PowerEdge servers through the iDRAC’s Config XML functionality. Using ConfigXML, you can also tweak XML files to make configuration changes to one or many PowerEdge servers at the same time.

You can join the chat here. If you arrived here after 3pm Central on November 5th, or want to do some pre-reading, you might find this a good place to start.

New Servers, New Software and more

Dell announced Monday our Dell PowerEdge 12^th Generation Servers and always, the hardware garnered much of the interest, it’s tangible and you can see it, as in this picture of my boss and Dell VP/GM of Server Solutions, Forrest Norrod holding up our new 4-up M420 Blade server. However, along side the were a ton of announced and unannounced new features.

iDRAC7

The first worth a mention comes from our team, out-of-band management for updating the BIOS and firmware and managing hardware settings—independent of the OS or hypervisor throughout a server’s life cycle, and initial deployment of an OS for a physical server or a hypervisor for a virtual machine. That function is delivered by the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 7 with Lifecycle Controller (iDRAC7).

It is an all-in-one, out-of-band systems management option to remotely manage Dell PowerEdge servers. In iDRAC7, we have combined hardware enablement capabilities into a single, embedded controller that includes its own processor, power, and network connection and without OS agents, even when the OS or hypervisor isn’t booted. The iDRAC7 architects have worked with marketing to pull together a useful summary of the capabilities, it can be found here.

OpenManage Essentials

The next software initiative announced was the 1.0.1 release of OpenManage Essentials (OME). We listened to customers when it came to management consoles and while a lot of companies liked what we’d been doing and our partnership with Symantec for Dell Management Console, many of our smaller customers, and a few bigger ones wanted a simpler console for monitoring and that was quicker and easier to deploy. OME is it. There is a full OME wiki page here and development lead Rob Cox has summarised the 1.0.1 update here.

OpenManage Power Center

Not formally announced, but covered in slides and some presentations, because it’s linked to some of the advanced power management of our servers. The Fresh Air Initiative, Energy Smart design and the introduction of OpenManage Power Center in our 12^th generation servers has the potential to change the way you power and manage the power distributions across servers, racks and more.

Dell Virtual Network Architecture

There is a new wikicovering the announcement of the Dell Virtual Network Architecture, which has at its’ foundation High-performance switching systems for campus and data centers; Virtualized Layer 4-7 services; Comprehensive automation & orchestration software; Open workload/hypervisor interfaces. Our VNA framework aims to extend our current networking and virtualization capabilities across branch, campus and data center environments with an open networking framework for efficient IT infrastructure and workload intelligence. Shane Schick over on IT World Canada has a good summary.

Oh yeah, there was hardware too… Tomothy Prickett Morgan has a useful summary over at vulture central and the Dell summary page is here.

Dell Embedded Systems Management updates

Over at the Dell TechCenter, Peter Tsai has posted a great update on some of the features of the latest firmware updates to the Dell Blade Chasis Management Controller 3.2 including 10gb Ethernet support and enablement; LifeCycle Controller 1.5 updates including complete out-of-band backup and restore, and config management support for Converged Network Adapters; and finally iDrac 1.6 updates.

Head over to the TechCenter page for the complete list of features plus a link to some new whitepapers. I have to say though, the best reason to head over there is to watch the video they did of the new LifeCycle controller feature to backup and restore feature during a motherboard replacement. The LC features uses WS-MAN to completely take a copy of all the configuration, drivers etc. so that when the motherboard is replaced it can be restored along with the Broadcom Nic, PERC and ServiceTag and Asset Tag making it in essence indistinguishable from the original. Brilliant.