Add Dell PowerEdge Servers to VMware Aria Operations

In my previous blog post, I described how to prepare your Dell PowerEdge servers for integration with VMware Aria Operations for comprehensive dashboards and monitoring.

Configuring SNMPv3 on Dell iDRAC9 for VMware Aria Operations

This time we will talk about how to configure/add them to Aria Operations. First, get the Dell PowerEdge Management Pack from Dell/Broadcom and then log into your Aria Operations instance. Go to Administration -> Integrations -> Repository. There you will find all installed and available Management Packs / Integrations.

Click Add to import the required Dell management packs, i.e., PowerEdge or OpenManage Enterprise.

Once the Management Packs are installed, go to Accounts to add your PowerEdge servers and more.

By clicking Add, you will see an overview of all available account types, here we select Dell EMC PowerEdge.

A proper Preparation is everything! So please refer to my blog post above if you have not configured SNMPv3 on your PowerEdge servers. Now enter the iDRAC Management IP and select or create User Credentials. If you need to create a new User Credential, enter the following information:

• Credential Kind: SNMPv3
• Credential Name: Custom Name
• User: Which is configured in iDRAC9
• Auth Password: Which is configured in iDRAC9
• Authentication Type: authSHA or authMD5 (depends on your configuration)
• Privacy Password: Which is configured in iDRAC9
• Privacy Type: priv3DES or privAES (depends on your configuration)
• Optional: vSphere Host, vSphere Username and vSphere Password

Finally, select a collector or group and validate the connection, if you need to set more settings, see Advanced Settings and click Add.

Now you will see a section called Dell EMC PowerEdge, if you open it you will see that the newly added Dell server is in Warning status. This is normal during the initialization phase, once you refresh the page you will see an OK status.

Now the real work begins, as the Aria Operations collectors begin to gather all of the important data that we defined in advance. To take a closer look at the newly added nodes, you can go directly to Inventory -> Integrations (puzzle icon) -> Dell EMC PowerEdge to view different categories.

However, patience is required at this stage as the servers are still in the collection phase. This also means that we basically won’t see that much data/information yet, I like to recommend my customers to give Aria about 14 days to build relevant custom dashboards or to be able to see detailed monitoring.

Speaking of custom dashboards you can build, the Dell Management Pack already provides you with some dashboards, even for VxRail appliances! Go to Operations -> Dashboards -> All -> Dell EMC PowerEdge and choose between

• Health
• Overview
• Virtual Machine Workbench

Under the Health Dashboard we can already see some data and also alerts. There are many more things to discover and learn in Aria Operations, so stay tuned for this very interesting journey in enterprise monitoring. If you have any questions, please use the comments section below. 🙂