User's Manual

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End-To-End Hardware Management
The goal of end-to-end hardware management is to provide the system health status and up-to-date infrastructure
information that an administrator needs to respond to critical hardware events without leaving the Dell Management
Center or vCenter. End-to-end hardware management within the Dell Management Plug-in is divided into four separate
parts:
• Monitoring
• Inventory
• Advanced host management
• Warranty retrieval
Monitoring the Datacenter And Host System
Datacenter and host system monitoring lets an administrator monitor infrastructure health by displaying hardware
(server and storage) and virtualization-related events on the Tasks & Events tab in vCenter. Additionally, critical
hardware alarms can trigger the Dell Management Plug-in to put the host system into a maintenance mode, and in
certain cases migrate the virtual machines to another host system. For hosts prior to 12G, the Dell Management Plug-in
forwards OMSA alarms, and creates new ones for specific events. You can use these alarms to trigger actions that
vCenter allows, like a reboot, maintenance mode, or migrate. For example, when a dual power supply fails and an alarm
is created, the resulting action can be to migrate the virtual machine on that machine to a new one.
To perform monitoring:
1. Configure the Event and Alarm settings.
2. Configure OMSA trap destinations, if needed (hosts prior to 12G).
3. Use the Tasks & Events tab in vCenter to review event information.
Understanding Events And Alarms
You can edit events and alarms from the Dell Management Plug-in Management Center within Settings → Events and
Alarms. From this section you can select the Event Posting Level, enable Alarms for Dell Hosts, or Restore Default
Alarms.
There are four Event Posting Levels.
Table 1. Event Posting Level Descriptions
Event Description
Do not post any Events Do not have the Dell Management Plug-in forward any
events or alerts into related vCenters.
Post all Events Post all events, including informal events, that the Dell
Management Plug-in receives from managed Dell hosts
into related vCenters.
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