Today, Dell released Update 1 to the 1.0.1 version of their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The biggest highlight among the fixes and changes would be the added support of ESX5 (vCenter 5). If you’re currently running the 1.0.1 plugin under a vCenter 5 environment (which ‘works’, just not in a supported kind of way), you’ll need to unregister and re-register the Dell Management Plugin after upgrading (see the Release Notes for all issues/resolutions).
One of the major changes from the original 1.0 to the 1.0.1 plug-in was the promise that updates to the appliance/software would come as an RPM patch and not tied to re-deploying another OVF. I’m glad to report that this worked wonderfully. You can find full instructions in the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter User Guide (page 41), but here’s the quick and dirty:
- Always backup your appliance. Always backup pre-upgrade. When? Always.
- Open up and log into the web admin portal (https://myApplianceHostname/)
- Click on ‘Appliance Management’ in the left menu
- Click ‘Upgrade’
– This will boot you out of the portal, upgrade the software and reboot the VM (the User Guide makes no mention that it reboots the VM, so just know that it does).
– I recommend opening up a VM Console so you don’t have to just sit and refresh the page to see if it’s back up or not - Restart your vCenter Client (this might just be me because I was having some DNS issues at the time on my desktop)
The whole process took about 10 minutes for me. It took about 7 minutes before I saw the appliance reboot.