This post is co-written by Raja Tamilarasan and Chris Poblete

Dell’s 12th generation of PowerEdge servers come equipped with the second generation of embedded server management, iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller.

When updating BIOS or other firmware in your server, you are probably used to downloading the update executable file from support.dell.com and simply run the update on the host OS. It’s only a few steps and in moments you reboot your system for the update to take effect. It sounds nice in an ideal situation.

What if you had to do this on hundreds servers ?
What if you had to do it on a server without an OS ?
What if you want to run the update during a scheduled downtime ?
What if you could improve your overall update experience ?

iDRAC7 comes to the rescue. Lifecycle Controller in iDRAC7 offers you an update solution through its WSMAN interface, a standards-based data messaging over a secure SSL connection.  This interface is an API but it can be easily scripted using tools already available in the OS such as winrm or client libraries such as from the opensource OpenWsman project.

The remote update environment looks like:

You put all the relevant update files in a (3) network share that supports a download service and run your update scripts in a (1) client system. The following summarizes the update process:

1. Enumerate DCIM_SoftwareIdentity to select the component to be updated.
2. Invoke the InstallFromURI method with the download info including appropriate update file.
3. Schedule the update job with a reboot job to execute at a time of your choosing.
4. At the scheduled time, the system reboots and the update is executed.
5. Thereafter, you may check the update job for success or failure.

See the full article in this whitepaper: 

   Scripting WS-MAN Firmware Updates

 iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller Technical Learning Series.