Dell Lifecycle Controller Remote Services v2.70.70.70 Quick Start Guide September 2019 Rev.
Notes, cautions, and warnings NOTE: A NOTE indicates important information that helps you make better use of your product. CAUTION: A CAUTION indicates either potential damage to hardware or loss of data and tells you how to avoid the problem. WARNING: A WARNING indicates a potential for property damage, personal injury, or death. © 2018 - 2019 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. Dell, EMC, and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries.
Contents Chapter 1: Introduction................................................................................................................. 5 Advantages of using Lifecycle Controller...................................................................................................................... 5 Benefits of using iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller...................................................................................................... 6 Key features.....................................
Viewing the managed computer system using the Physical Computer System View................ 20 Job management............................................................................................................................................................... 20 Job types....................................................................................................................................................................... 20 System status...............................................
1 Introduction Dell Lifecycle Controller provides advanced embedded systems management to perform systems management tasks such as deploy, configure, update, maintain, and diagnose. It is delivered as part of integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) out-of-band solution and embedded Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) applications in the latest Dell servers.
Benefits of using iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller The benefits include: ● Increased Uptime — Early notification of potential or actual failures that help prevent a server failure or reduce recovery time after a failure. ● Improved Productivity and Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) — Extending the reach of administrators to larger numbers of distant servers can make IT staff more productive while driving down operational costs such as travel.
● The default URL on the HTTPS page is downloads.dell.com. Advantages of using Lifecycle Controller Remote Services When Dell examined the most common management tasks and the inefficiencies associated with them, it discovered that the additional time taken for performing management tasks was not because of the tools, but it was because of how the functions were split between several tools.
Lifecycle controller also supports local one-to-one system management tasks through a graphical user interface (GUI) using the server’s KVM or the Virtual Console in iDRAC for operating system installation, updates, configuration, and for running diagnostics on single and local servers. This eliminates the need for multiple option ROMs for hardware configuration. For more information, see Lifecycle Controller User’s Guide, available at www.delltechcenter.com/lc.
Other information that you may need In addition to this guide, you can refer the following guides available at dell.com/support/home or dell.com/idracmanuals: ● The Lifecycle Controller Online Help provides information about the fields available on the GUI and the descriptions for the same. To view the online help information in Lifecycle Controller user interface, click Help in the upper-right corner, or press . ● The Lifecycle Controller Release Notes is available with the product.
● 1. Go to www.dell.com/support. 2. Click Browse all products. 3. From All products page, click Software, and then click the required link from the following: ○ Analytics ○ Client Systems Management ○ Enterprise Applications ○ Enterprise Systems Management ○ Public Sector Solutions ○ Utilities ○ Mainframe ○ Serviceability Tools ○ Virtualization Solutions ○ Operating Systems ○ Support 4. To view a document, click the required product and then click the required version.
2 Remote Services Features Using Lifecycle Controller-Remote Services, you can perform the following operations: ● Deploy and Configure ● Monitor ● Maintain ● Create and schedule jobs Topics: • • • • Deployment and configuration Monitor Maintain Job management Deployment and configuration Using various Lifecycle Controller-Remote Services' capabilities, you can perform different configurations on a system throughout its lifecycle.
● Retrieve current iDRAC configuration and inventory ● Get and set any configurable iDRAC attribute ● Manage iDRAC user accounts RAID configuration The RAID configuration feature is used to manage the properties and capabilities of the RAID storage. The RAID storage is modeled using a collection of attributes, where there are collections for the enclosures, storage adapters, logical disks, physical disk drives, and PCIeSSD devices.
NIC configuration Network Interface Controller (NIC) configuration feature is used to set up or modify configuration settings for supported NIC cards (for example, Intel, QLogic, and Broadcom). These configuration settings can be set or updated both locally and remotely using Lifecycle Controller-Remote Services.
For more information on the QuickSync feature, see the System QuickSync profile document available at en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1906.dcim-library-profile.aspx. Also, see iDRAC User’s Guide available at www.dell.com/esmmanuals. Configuring advanced security using hash password You can set user passwords and BIOS passwords using a one-way hash format in iDRAC available on the 13th generation Dell PowerEdge servers.
Collecting system inventory When Collect System Inventory On Restart (CSIOR) is set to enabled, Lifecycle Controller performs an inventory and collects the configuration information for all hardware on every system restart. Also, the system inventory collection also detects any changes in hardware.
System event log The Lifecycle Log contains events related to system, storage devices, network devices, firmware updates, configuration changes, license messages, and so on. However, the system events are also available as a separate log called the System Event Log (SEL). When a system event occurs on a managed system, it is recorded in the SEL. The same SEL entries are also available in the Lifecycle Log.
NOTE: To use this feature, iDRAC enterprise license is required. For more information about monitoring the out-of-band performance, see the Dell Base Metrics Profile and Dell Sensors Profile document available at www.delltechcenter.com/systemsmanagement. Maintain Using various Lifecycle Controller-Remote Services capabilities, you can maintain the health of a system throughout its lifecycle.
Ready ● Enabling PCI slots — PCI slots in the system that are disabled in the BIOS require two imports – one to enable the slot and another to configure the card in the slot. Example If the Slot1 BIOS attribute on the import system is disabled, the first import must contain the following: PAGE 19Server license — import Lifecycle Controller-Remote Services can import (restore) the server license of a host system. These operations are commonly used during motherboard replacement. You can import the license from a USB drive or a network share such as CIFS or NFS. Provisioning Server The Provisioning Server feature in iDRAC allows newly installed servers to automatically discover the remote management console that hosts the Provisioning Server.
Viewing the managed computer system using the Physical Computer System View Physical Computer System View (PCSV) provides the view of a managed system such as current state and configuration. You can directly access PCSV using PowerShell commands. Using PCSV you can: ● ● ● ● Receive information about the managed elements. Directly enumerate the CIM_PhysicalComputerSystem from the console without any prior knowledge of a particular class. Use a registered profile to enumerate the implemented features.
System status This feature is used to remotely obtain the overall Remote Services API status that includes real-time CEM status, the host system status, and the remote service status. The overall status is displayed in the Status output parameter. After the job is complete in Automated Task Application (previously SSM), the job status is immediately updated in the job store. The job is immediately moved to the Completed state and synchronization starts.
3 Getting started with API collateral and links Getting started with any feature of Lifecycle Controller begins at the Dell TechCenter Lifecycle Controller home page — www.delltechcenter.com/lc. The home page contains various sections that reference URLs, and these referenced URLs are direct links to the corresponding sections. You can follow these steps to get started using the Lifecycle Controller API: 1. Identify the feature or the required management operation. 2.
Table 2. Profiles (continued) Profile Name Description BIOS and Boot Management The BIOS and Boot Management Profile extends the management capabilities of referencing profiles by adding the capability to represent the configuration of the system BIOS setup and to manage the boot of the system. CPU The DCIM CPU Profile describes the properties and interfaces for running system management tasks related to the management of processors within a system.
Table 2. Profiles (continued) Profile Name Description DCIM_LCService provider adds the following methods: RunePSADiagnostics () and ExportePSADiagnosticsResult() for the automatic diagnostics.
Table 2. Profiles (continued) Profile Name Description Role Based Authorization The DCIM Role Based Authorization Profile describes the properties and interfaces for running system management tasks related to the authorization. Sensors The DCIM Sensors Profile describes the properties and interfaces for running system management tasks related to the management of sensors within a system.
Managed object file The Common Information Model (CIM) is an open standard that defines how managed elements in an IT environment are represented as a common set of objects and relationships between them. This is intended to allow consistent management of these managed elements, independent of their manufacturer or provider. Files that contain the normative description for classes, properties, and methods are contained within the Managed Object File (MOF).
Attribute registry XML The attribute registry lists all the attributes and properties for the particular component in XML format. For attribute registries of RAID, NIC, iDRAC, BIOS, FC HBA, and PCIeSSD, see en.community.dell.com/dell-groups/dtcmedia/m/mediagallery/ 20440476. Event message registry XML The message registry XML describes all messages, message IDs, and message arguments from all profiles.
● Enterprise Table 3.
4 Integrating the Lifecycle Controller API This section outlines the resources required to integrate the Lifecycle Controller API into an application: ● API Clients– Lists the API clients that are available to support WinRM or WSMAN. The API clients enable a you to create an application in a variety of programming languages. ● Best Practices Guide— Provides information about the common work flows, where in ready-to-use Python scripts are provided for all the common work flows.
● Other scripting examples — https://downloads.dell.com/solutions/general-solution-resources/White_Papers/ Lifecycle_Controller_Remote_Firmware_Update_Scripting.pdf The Github repository "iDRAC-Redfish-Scripting" provides Python and PowerShell scripting examples for the iDRAC REST API with Redfish. The scripts illustrate key use cases for server inventory, configuration, monitoring and update. ● iDRAC REST API with Redfish — https://github.com/dell/iDRAC-Redfish-Scripting .
5 Social media reference To obtain the most up-to-date information, go to the Dell TechCenter and search for the required information. Table 4. Product Information Product Name and topic Link on Dell TechCenter Lifecycle Controller www.dell.com/idracmanuals integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) www.dell.com/idracmanuals Dell Chassis Management Controller www.dell.com/cmcmanuals Systems Management General Forum www.dell.
6 Terms and definitions The following table lists the terms used in this document and their definitions. Table 5. Terms and definitions Term Definition LC Lifecycle Controller Enumerate Refers to WS-MAN ENUMERATE operation as described in Section 8.2 of DSP0226_V1.1 and Section 9.1 of DSP0227_V1.0 Get Refers to WS-MAN GET operation as defined in Section 7.3 of DSP00226_V1.1 and Section 7.1 of DSP0227_V1.
