How to hide unknown devices in Dell OpenManage Essentials (or IT Assistant)

When discovering a large number of devices, usually you'll pick up a few non-Dell bits of hardware, such as Virtual Machines or network switches.

Luckily Dell have an option to avoid cluttering up OME with these, although of course they have put it in a wierd place.

Instead of being with all the main configuration options under preferences, it's actually under the discovery schedule settings in Manage / Discovery and Inventory / Discovery Schedule

Equallogic setup.pl script not working with vCLI 5.5

Dell supply (with the VMware Multipath module) a perl setup script for their Equallogic arrays to aid configuring VMware host networking (distributed switches are not recommended for storage).

This script relies on both perl, and the VMware command line interface (vCLI) to connect to hosts.

The vCLI version usually needs to match the host ESXi version you're trying to connect to, but the latest v5.5 vCLI appears to be missing some modules.

The usual way to install them would be to use ppm or cpan, but ppm as implemented in the vCLI doesn't appear to have all modules listed and if you've installed vCLI to the default path, dmake.exe will have issues with the spaces in the path when installing modules with cpan.  The answer to this is to install it to a short directory name off the root (e.g. c:\vCLI)

Once you're able to install modules, from the vCLI run the following commands:
cpan
install CPAN
reload cpan
install SOAP::Lite
install MIME::Parser
install Data::UUID

This should install all the required components for the setup script. 

Unfortunately the UUID module isn't installed into the default include (@INC) path so you need to manually specify it.

You can do this either by setting an environment variable or my preferred option of manually specifying the path in the perl command to run the script.
First locate the module in your installation
dir c:\UUID.pm /S

Then run perl with the -I (capital i) parameter: 
perl -I C:\vCLI\Perl\site\lib\Data setup.pl

See this page for more information on non-default @INC paths: http://perlmaven.com/how-to-change-inc-to-find-perl-modules-in-non-standard-locations

Dell Openmanage Essentials shows cluster name instead of hostname

When you use Openmanage to discover servers that are part of a Microsoft HA cluster, by default it will use the cluster name for the active node instead of the hostname.

To get around this, add an exclusion against the Cluster VIP and Openmanage Essentials should ignore the cluster info and just connect to the host.

Vmware Update Manager Error code 15 when updating Dell OpenManage

The vmware update manager logfile (C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Update Manager\Logs) may show the error “Could not find a trusted signer”

This can be resolved by removing the Dell VIBs for OpenManage and the Equallogic Multipath Module and reinstalling manually
esxcli software vib remove -n OpenManage -n dell-configuration-vib -n dell-eql-host-connection-mgr -n dell-eql-hostprofile -n dell-eql-routed-psp


Manually re-install the OpenManage VIB
esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-7.2.0-6945.VIB-ESX51i.zip

Reboot the host to remove the loaded VIBs from memory and load the new version of OpenManage

The equallogic module can be reinstalled with Update Manager with no reboot required