How to Install Dell OMSA 5.5 on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with CentOS 5 / RHEL 5 4

This entry was posted in Linux Reference Technology and tagged 2650 CentOS CentOS 5 Dell OMSA OMSA 5.5 OpenManage PE2650 PowerEdge PowerEdge 2650 on by (updated 3833 days ago)

The current (as of this writing) versions of Dell’s OpenManage Server Administration software (OMSA) isn’t backward compatible with older hardware like the Dell PowerEdge 2650. However, if you want to install OMSA on a PE2650, you’re in luck. Using the Dell Linux Repository, you can have OpenManage 5.5 (which is plenty for most purposes) running on your 2650 in just a few minutes.

If you’re hoping to manage or reset a DRAC III card in addition to installing OMSA, then after you finish the steps in this howto, jump on over to my blog post here, skip down to Step 2, then use “restart” instead of “start” in Step 3.

The most current version of the OMSA tools that will run on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 is OMSA 5.5, so that’s what we’ll use. Keep in mind that if you try to install a later version of OMSA, you’ll likely run into trouble.

Step 1: Set up the Dell OMSA Repository

Set up the OMSA 5.5 version of Dell’s repository with:

wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/2008_Q3/bootstrap.cgi | bash

This will make the correct (older) version of the Dell OMSA repo to the list available to yum, and will also install some Dell firmware management tools. The output will include:

============================================================================================================================
Package                            Arch                  Version                   Repository                         Size
============================================================================================================================
Installing:
 firmware-addon-dell                i386                  2.1.2-1.1                 dell-omsa-indep                    56 k
Installing for dependencies:
 firmware-tools                     noarch                2.1.2-4.1                 dell-omsa-specific                203 k
 libsmbios                          i386                  2.1.0-1.2                 dell-omsa-specific                1.3 M
 smbios-utils                       i386                  2.1.0-1.2                 dell-omsa-specific                119 k
Transaction Summary
============================================================================================================================
Install       4 Package(s) Upgrade       0 Package(s)

Step 2: Install OMSA

The package that contains the racadm CLI utility required to manage your DRAC is included with the srvadmin-racser-devel package. This package has three dependencies, so if they’re not already installed, yum will fix that for you. Type:

yum install srvadmin-all

You’ll see a number of packages, and potentially some dependencies.

Step 3: Protect OMSA from being upgraded

If you’re running a Dell PowerEdge 2650, version 5.5 of OMSA is the latest that supports your hardware, so you’ll need to tell yum not to update OMSA to a later version. Edit the /etc/yum.conf file with your favorite text editor and add this line at the bottom:

exclude=srvadmin-*

The next time you run yum update, it will ignore any updates to OMSA.

Step 4: Start all the services

Now you’re ready to start the svradmin service by typing:

srvadmin-services.sh start

Then start the Systems Management Device Drivers with:

/etc/init.d/dataeng start

Finally, start the OMSA web interface with:

/etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start

Log in to the web interface

You should now be able to access the web interface at https://your-hostname-or-ip-address:1311/. Be sure to add port 1311 to your firewall settings if you want to be able to access OMSA remotely. Log in using the root username and password.

Step 5: Install the OMSA Nagios plugin (optional)

If you’re the kind of sysadmin who wants to install OMSA, then I’m guessing you’re also probably the kind of sysadmin who uses the excellent (and free) Nagios to monitor your servers. There are a few plugins that do the job, but my favorite is check_openmanage.

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