User's Manual

Zero-Touch Hardware Provisioning And

Deployment

Hardware Prerequisites

To successfully perform hardware provisioning and deployment, the physical servers must appear in the Deployment

Wizard. All physical servers must meet the following prerequisites:

• See the

Dell Management Plug-In for VMWare vCenter Release Notes

for specific hardware support

information.

• The server must have the minimum supported versions of iDRAC firmware, Lifecycle controller and BIOS. See

the

Dell Management Plug- in for VMWare vCenter Release Notes

for specific hardware support information.

NOTE: If the firmware versions are outdated, a two step upgrade process could be required. See the

firmware documentation for detailed upgrade instructions.

• The Dell Management Plug-in supports deployment using only embedded/integrated LOMs. You can configure

NICs in PCI slots manually after the deployment. If using add-on NICs, the system must have the host LOMs

enabled.

• The Dell Management Plug-in allows deployment onto Internal Dual SD Module (hypervisor only) or local hard

drives. Before you install hypervisor to an Internal Dual SD Module, it must have a maximum of 1 or 2 GB of

storage. The Internal Dual SD Module must be enabled from BIOS before you deploy the hypervisor with the Dell

Management Plug-in. You can change the management NIC manually, and add the system to vCenter.

• If the iDRAC is in dedicated mode, its NIC must be enabled to communicate with the Dell Management Plug-in.

• CSIOR must be enabled. Additionally, before initiating Auto Discovery, to make sure that retrieved data is

current, the system must be completely powered off and then back on (hard reboot).

• Dell servers can be ordered with Auto Discovery and handshake options pre-configured by the factory. If a

server is not pre-configured with these options, you must manually enter the Dell Management Plug-In IP

address or configure your local network to provide this information.

• If the Dell Management Plug-in is not used for hardware configuration, then make sure the following conditions

are met prior to initiating hypervisor deployment:

– Enable the VT (Virtualization Technology) flag in the BIOS.

– Set the system's boot order to either a bootable Virtual Disk or an Internal Dual SD Module for operating

system installation.

• If the Dell Management Plug-in is used for hardware configuration, the BIOS setting for VT is automatically

enabled, even if BIOS configuration is not part of the hardware profile. Express/Clone RAID configuration is

required if a virtual disk is not already present on the target system.

• If your servers are from versions prior to 12G, then the deployment process installs the OpenManage Server

Administrator package on the target system, and automatically configures the SNMP trap destination to point to

the Dell Management Plug-in.

• Custom ESXi images that contain

all

the Dell drivers are required for deployment. You can find the correct

images by going to the Dell Drivers & Downloads page and saving the custom images to a location you can

access during the deployment process. For the most up-to date list of supported ESXi versions for this release,

see the Release Notes.