Dell includes a fair amount of software with its servers, but I'm having a hard time determining from the documentation what each of them does, and whether or not I should install it. Dell's support site (unless I'm doing it wrong) seems fairly opaque to me and its offerings fairly unstandardized in terms of their usage, so if possible I'd like to stray away from them. Specifically, I'm curious if any of the features offered are duplicated in something like Microsoft System Center.
For additional background information, I'm working with a Poweredge 2950 that was just rebuilt with an expanded raid-6, but initially I just installed Server 2008 R2 directly instead of using the Build and Update utility. There's nothing of use on it at the moment so I'm totally open to wiping it again.
Best Answer
openmanage is most useful for seeing the status of your raid, temps, etc that arn't available directly to the OS
Several of the drivers will improve performance/functionality over the default windows ones. Usually you want at least chipset, networking and graphics