We had two Dell Poweredge servers donated to us yesterday which I want to install ESXi on. I'm used to HP servers, but I understand that it is possible to buy Dell servers with ESXi pre-installed. I've seen a lot of references to OpenManagement and Drac and other monitoring and installation tools, and I'm confused as to the best way to install ESXi on a Dell Poweredge server.
Do I install ESXi from the iso downloaded from VMware and then add Dell management tools? Do I install some management tools first? Is there a special Dell version of ESXi? Do I configure raid first, and what tools do I use for that?
What Dell tools should I be using and installing alongside ESXi?
Best Answer
Given your clarification on the Server models the only choice you have for ESXi is to download the generic ESXi Installable version, boot from that ISO and follow the instructions. A base ESXi install is very simple - all you need to know is you host name, main management network ip-adress and network info. Optionally you can plug in an ntp server address and a license key if you like at this stage, or do that later.
It's not possible to add custom management agents to ESXi - you have to get a version with the management tools built in. The ESXi "Console" is just a busybox enabled set of tools running on the hypervisor, it's not an environment that you can or should significantly modify.
That is if you want to use those agents - that will only matter to you if you have a systems management console that you want to use for full hardware management. Even without that you will get a significant amount of hardware level diagnostic data via ESXi (and visible in the VI Client) telling you things about the health of the hardware (various temps, fan speeds, failure stats from the Systems Management and Power Management buses for example). You would get more data and more active control via the Open Manage agent but how useful that would be depends on your needs. If the machines have a DRAC then you will have most of that data and active out of band management capability available directly that way.
As far as RAID is concerned, yes you should configure RAID in advance via the RAID Firmware utility during boot. ESXi doesn't absolutely need local storage but it's a good idea to have some storage visible to it as it likes to configure some scratch partitions (around 5GB in total IIRC). Having these available makes future upgrades and debugging much easier. You wont lose much storage and the install will configure all of the remaining blank space on the boot volume as a VMFS datastore for your VM's.