If you are switching to the Dell OpenManage platform, one of the first tasks you need to accomplish is how to manage other vendor's hardware.

Dell OpenManage is built around industry standard protocols. Among other protocols, it can communicate with servers using SNMP and IPMI. So if another vendor's hardware can communicate using industry standard protocols, we can typically view it through ITA.

References

Configuring Dell OpenManage ITA to Manage Non-Dell Servers - by Saiprasad S.

This Dell PowerSolutions article discusses how to use SNMP on non-Dell servers for inclusion in Dell IT Assistant. It also covers how to import MIBS from other vendors platforms to be used by ITA so the alerts appear correctly in the interface. It also covers the ITA SNMP Event Source Import Utility.

Monitoring and Managing Agentless Servers using Dell ITA 8.0 with IPMI - by Suresh John

This Dell PowerSolutions article discusses the configuration of IPMI on non-Dell servers so they can be discovered and managed by Dell IT Assistant.

Example

In the Dell TechCenter lab we have an HP DL385. It is currently installed with Windows Server 2003. This first screenshot shows the server (r6windl385a) in the ITA console after we have configured the SNMP settings and discovered the system. You can see that we do get some information from very little configuration.



Looking at the Device Details information, we can see even more details on the hardware configuration. But as you can see in the screenshot, ITA does not really "know" what this device is, as indicated by the gray question mark.



Before we dive deeper into how we can further integrate this server, let's explore how we can launch one of the HP server utilities from the ITA interface.

Dell ITA lets you define Favorite Applications that can be assigned to systems in the ITA console. So in this example, we have the "HP System Management Homepage" application installed on the HP DL385. This application allows you to view the health status of the HP server through a web browser on port 2381.

Using the Favorite Application feature of Dell ITA, we can define this as shown in the screenshot below.



We are then able to launch this application by right clicking on the HP server in the ITA console and selecting the application.

Importing MIBs into ITA

ITA includes the SNMP Event Source Import Utility (ImportEventSources.exe). This utility is used to import MIB information into the ITA database so it can interpret the SNMP traps received from devices.

While the MIB information is well defined, the methods for defining them in text files to be imported is not. This means we can not simply download a vendors MIB file and import it directly into the database. The definitions must be properly formatted so the SNMP Event Source Import Utility can interpret them correctly.

This is covered in the PowerSolutions article, Configuring Dell OpenManage ITA to Manage Non-Dell Servers - by Saiprasad S. The author of this article took the HP MIBs, at the time the article was written, and converted them to the file format that ImportEventSources.exe could interpret. I managed to extract the contents from the PDF file and have provided them for you as an attachment on this page. I tested this file on our ITA system in the lab and it imported correctly.



Now for the more interesting and challenging portion, updating the MIBs. Stay tuned for more.