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Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter with Dell Repository Manager
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servers through its SUU utility and online quarterly. The bundles are defined in a repository, which is a
collection of bundles and individual updates.
For repositories created by Repository Manager and the bundles they contain to be consumed by the
Dell Management Plug-in, make the bundles applicable to the target platform and the bundles should
also contain DUPs in the Windows (exe) format.
To create one repository to manage all your systems, make sure to create at least one bundle for each
system type in your environment, for example: a user with Dell PowerEdge M610, Dell PowerEdge R710,
and Dell PowerEdge T610 servers in their environment would create a repository with three bundles,
one for each model.
The Dell Management Plug-in only applies firmware consumable by the Lifecycle Controller. The Dell
Management Plug-in inventories the Lifecycle Controller and matches that against the bundle
definitions in the user repository to determine what firmware is applicable to a target system.
Any drivers, non-applicable or OS-specific firmware does not appear in the Firmware Wizard of the Dell
Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. For full details on the firmware update capabilities of the
Lifecycle Controller, see its documentation.
Currently, Lifecycle Controller supports the update of BIOS, RAID, iDRAC, NIC, Driver Pack, Power
Supply, Diagnostics, and Lifecycle Controller firmware. Limiting bundles to containing only those
updates keeps the size of the configured repository at a minimum.
Automatically creating a repository using Repository Manager Plug-in
Integration Feature
Dell Repository Manager has built in integration with the Dell Management Center Plug-In for VMware
vCenter. Using your Dell Management Plug-in credentials, Dell Repository Manager pulls vCenter host
information from the Dell Management Plug-in inventory and automatically creates a custom local
firmware update repository that matches your environment.
Dell Repository Manager also lets you create diff reports between online repository from Dell and your
local repository, so you can move new updates into your local repository as you need them.
With the Dell Management Center Plug-In for VMware vCenter is configured to consume that local
repository, once new updates are made available in your local repository with DRM, Dell Management
Plug-in matches hosts in your environment against your custom baselines and deploys updates directly
from the Dell Repository Manager repository.
For more information on Dell Repository Manager integration with the Dell Management Center Plug-In
for VMware vCenter, see its documentation.
Setting up a share with a custom repository
Once a repository is created and saved using the Dell Repository Manager, host it on a share from which
the Dell Management Plug-in can access the share.
The Dell Management Plug-in supports two kinds of shares, NFS and CIFS. Use CIFS shares with Windows
operating systems and NFS shares with Linux based operating systems.