Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

Someone on the Dell PowerEdge mailing list has written a script that uses SOAP calls to query dell's warranty site . I'm sure it's helpful to someone else to know this.

Dell has released a statement about ubuntu 11.10 on Dell PowerEdge . Dell lists that Ubuntu should work where the previous versions also worked and is currently re-certifying most PowerEdge and PowerEdge-C servers. Check Canonical's hardware certification page for details. Also good to know is that OpenManage (OMSA) has been released for Ubuntu , although it is not officially supported.

Dell TechCenter posted a very easy "how to get started" guide for KVM Virtualization that you may find useful if you're just getting started and know little or nothing about virtualization (in Linux or elsewhere). It's good for the basics.

Dell TechCenter has released a LiveDVD image with OMSA to update firmware and BIOS on Dell hardware using a CentOS Linux distro.

Dell's released the latest version of OpenManage 6.5.1 . It provides drivers, BIOS and firmware updates from Linux when running Dell PowerEdge hardware.

The kind people of the German university of Göttingen have mirrored the Dell OMSA hardware and firmware repo for us. This way, we have a European mirror available that is also much faster than Dell's native server.

Dell has released version 6.5 of their OpenManage repository with firmware and BIOS updates as well as Linux monitoring of hardware found in Dell servers.

Dell's OMSA is great for maintaining and updating a Dell server's firmware, if it works... Dell does a great job so far, but sometimes little quirks mess up small parts and suddenly OMSA will update all or nothing or only a few and then call it quits. pjwelsh has written a handy little summary of the various ways with which you can try to still get working, albeit manually: Failed BIOS update on Dell R710 with CentOS 5.5 solved! (Worked around, really)

Dell recently published a little more details about what Ubuntu Certified and Ubuntu Ready means . Even though Dell does not officially support Ubuntu, their hardware is labelled as Certified by Canonical and they can also provide with paid support for Enterprises that require it.

Dell has made the source code to iDRAC6 available online, at least somewhat...You can find the code on  Dell Support . That is code only, no build environment or firmware image creation scripts as required by GPLv3. New versions of iDRAC can be found on  http://ftp.us.dell.com/esm/ . Many thanks to yo61.com for finding it and publishing it on the Dell Linux mailing list . Update: Dell gave a better working Dell Support link. Update: All official Dell DRAC manuals

Dell Community notified us that you can now install Ubuntu Server Edition on its servers. While they won't factory-install it and Dell support itself will not support it, Dell has worked with Canonical for the past 2 years to support it. Canonical will be offering support for Ubuntu on Dell servers. To make support easier, Dell has built a native .deb package of OMSA 6.3 on Ubuntu 9.10.

Robin at yo61.com found a great and handy way to discover the MAC addresses of the embedded NICs of your Dell (PowerEdge) servers. Instead of going through DRAC, logging in, starting Java, etc. you can also get the same using the RAC command line interface: racadm racdump. Read the article on yo61.com for complete details. Excellent! If only I could find a similar command for my 500 PE2950 servers with DRAC5...

There are at least 2 version of the new iDRAC, Dell's remote server management and monitoring vehicle. Documentation from Dell lists the differences between the two and the older BMC interface.

I've been diving a bit into the RAM configuration of our new R710 Dell servers. They have new memory configuration settings. "Memory Optimized" mode can yield a 50% performance improvement at no cost other than to place DIMMs in appropriate slots. Dell has a white paper detailing the options a bit more: Optimizing DDR3 Memory Settings in New 11th-Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers . It also lists trade-offs of choosing one configuration over the other or when to go for a balanced intermediate.

I've started work on a DRAC wiki hosted on wikidot.com. Since the source code to DRAC was discovered on Dell's servers, a recent flurry of activity on the PowerEdge mailing list showed that there is great interest in this and a lot of confusion about how, what and where?

Gavin Burns, from I Do Linux has a useful tip that you can use to upgrade of flash your servers BIOS and/or firmware. These utils are often DOS floppy images. Besides not having a floppy anymore these days, getting the server to boot a floppy image can present challenges too. Dell's DRAC often eludes me because the boot order won't choose the floppy (unless I hit F11 to get the boot menu, of course). From the article Create DOS Boot Disk for CD or GRUB you'll learn to get the DOS floppy image and create a bootable ISO from it. You can burn the ISO to CD or use the boot image to add a GRUB menu option. Handy!

In compliance with GPL license used by Dell to create DRAC, Dell finally made the source code of their web-based remote server management interface available on their website . It used to be available only after explicit requests. DRAC is built on BusyBox Linux , as reported here earlier.

I'm in the middle of creating a deployment image of OEL 5u3 (based on RHEL5u3) for new Dell PowerEdge R710 servers. After creating a generic and untested setup for the BIOS, my VMware guy came and informed me that vSphere 4 recommendations list to disable memory interleaving. Generally, letting NUMA do its thing yields better performance. So I'm now checking whether or not use interleaving for my 32 GB servers or to use NUMA out-of-the-box on Linux 2.6.18 as shipped with OEL5u3. I could switch to " Optimizer Mode " for the 32 GB but I'll need to have all servers physically checked and DIMMs reseated. So I opted for Interleaving to hope and try to gain some performance increase. Now I find out NUMA could be better and it is supported from RHEL5, which each update improving on it. I'll have to run more tests to be sure but for now I'm glad I discovered I could enable NUMA on OEL4u5 or higher as well, using a kernel option at boot time. Be sure to check nu...

Once again I am running into the weird issue where at install time my NICs are enumerated one way and after a reboot another. This first happened to me in 2007, while installing Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 4u5 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950. The on-board NICs were numbered 'gb1' and 'gb2' but enumerated 'eth1' and 'eth0', respectively. Strangely, the problem went away silently and just now reappeared in OEL 5u3. Today I am using new R11 servers from Dell, the R710 with two dual on-board Broadcom NICs as well the quad-NIC add-on from Intel. At boot, my 'eth0' seems to be what I expect it but after a reboot it becomes 'eth4'. Found an updated white paper from Dell, listing a work-around: nic-enum-whitepaper-v4.pdf .

Where I had great difficulties trying to get OMSA to install let alone work in Oracle's Enterprise Linux 4 (u5 and above), I am happy to report that I got it working out-of-the-box after an install of my custom 5u3 image, following the instructions on the OMSA Repository Wiki . A simple http proxy setting, the wget boot strap line to configure yum and the dependencies and I was in business! Excellent work, Dell!