Agentless Management with PowerShell for DELL iDRAC

DELL provides agentless management of iDRAC by PowerShell. It’s more convenience for enterprise level infrastructure compare with HPE Scripting Tools or Cisco PowerTools. You don’t have to install any extra software to retrieve hardware data from iDRAC

DELL provides an article “Agentless Management with PowerShell 3.0 – CIM Cmdlets and iDRAC/Lifecycle Controller” with a sample code which is very detail. The scripts leverage public repos on internet: schemas.dell.com.

But what if your infrastructure is offline or internet is blocked?

After few hours dig into it. I found a workaround works in my environment.

  1. Go to DCIM library profile to find profile of what your iDRAC. (I use DCIM System Info Profile for example)
  2. The document tells what’s the ” Implementation Namespace” and “Central Class”.
  3. Follow sample code in DELL document but when you connect CIM session use following format:
Get-CimInstance -CimSession $session -ClassName <class name> -Namespace <Name space name>

In my sample, the command is:

Get-CimInstance -CimSession $session -ClassName DCIM_SystemView -Namespace "root/dcim"

I have some posts talk about PowerShell. Here is the article to get space utilization of Windows Servers.

Thoughts of VMworld 2019

This is my 7th time been VMworld. It’s a great IT conference. Meet genius people, experience latest technologies, discuss with experts, and listen to other’s ideas. Technology is changing really fast. I still remember VMworld was talking about ‘be pioneers’ few years ago. But now we have moved to cloud world.

‘Virtualization’ was the big focusing when I first time attended VMworld. Now VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat grabbed most of market shares. ‘Virtualization’ is very maturely today. I could see most of 3rd party vendors were focused on ‘performance monitor’ on VMworld 2017. I think the reason was no space on ‘virtualization’ market, but performance monitor was a big market. After two years, we could see lot of great virtualization performance products, such as vRealize Operation Managers, NetApp OCI, Uila…etc. Even open source product like Zabbix, added more support of ‘virtualization’ product. What’s the next?

When I went to Solution Exchange this year. Backup product everywhere, they have big booths and great shows out there. My view is cloud backup would be under spotlights in next few years. The reason is customers are moving from premises to cloud, or somehow leverage cloud. Data protection is a new demand. Every storage vendor plans or already published their data protection product aims to cloud backup. Such as VMware Cloud for AWS for DR. Some new innovators also provide pure cloud based backup services. Such as Clumio, it backups data from premises to AWS cloud with 0 traffic charge.

VMware released ‘Project Pacific’ on VMworld 2019. It aims to native apps and containers. It’s a evolution of vSphere. I think it will renew vSphere product lifecycle and give vSphere administrators more opportunities for next decade if it can be successfully. Think about containers can be vMotion between ESXi hosts, and HA protected…all these vSphere attributes will be part of containers. And everything is manageable under vSphere Client HTML 5 version. I believe it will be VMware’s next big thing.

I joined a session of ESXi on ARM. Looks like it’s still on very early stage. People is still discussing use case of that architecture. One thing is it can be witness node of vSAN cluster. I think the advantage of ESXi on ARM is services are running on a virtual machine on ESXi on ARM. Virtual machine is something easy to protect, recovery or program. It means services are more stable and flexible. This attribute matches mission critical product line. It maybe more usefully on manufacturing. For example a ESXi on Raspberry Pi. It’s portable, low cost, low power consumption, can be survived in hard environment. Looks like a ideal solution. Only thing is service providers may need to cover hardware, ESXi, virtual machine, guest OS and applications. The reason is ESXi on ARM need to be well tuned. I don’t think end users like to do such complex things. What they need is ‘power up, plugin and use’ when they have a small device on hands.

Few other things of vSphere. vMotion performance will be increased. The suspending time will be significantly reduced. It will big help for database virtual machine migration. VMware technical support model will be changed. Current higher level supports will be transferred to ‘Primer Support’. For me, it’s just another way to increasing support cost. 🙂

I hope VMworld will be hosted in other city next year (Looks like not possible). San Francisco downtown is not a ideal place for big conference. It’s tight and expensive. It leads to lower quality of hotel and food.