The Web Services for Management (WS-Management) interface on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers offers an open environment for console integration. This discussion focuses on using the WS-Management interface for creating scripts and programs to manage the Dell Lifecycle Controller and providing a common way for systems to access and exchange management information across the entire IT infrastructure.

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Chat Transcript

cartershanklin Hey, Scott, do you guys have documents on your Common Information Model (CIM) interfaces to Dell PowerEdge servers?
Dell-ScottH @carter, sure do. We host them on our site: www.delltechcenter.com/page/dcim+-+dell+cim+extensions
Dell-ScottH Okay, I'm going to get it started. Welcome to this week’s chat
Dell-ScottH Today we will cover the Web Services for Management (WS-Management) interface into Dell Remote Access Controllers (DRACs) on PowerEdge servers. Feel free to ask questions at any time. This chat is recorded and a transcript will be available tomorrow on this same link—so don't worry about saving the URLs
Dell-d_glynn @carter: right-click the links :)
Dell-ScottH I'm fairly new to the WS-Management topic; just learned everything a few weeks ago and getting my feet wet, so might have to table your questions for the experts, which are currently in Las Vegas at our yearly training event. Yay them! So, I'll assume everyone can Google WS-Management :-)
Dell-ScottH Going forward, we are using the standard interfaces to make our systems agentless. This is really the first iteration of things that will be going forward in 12th-generation and 13th-generations servers. We are currently on 11th-generation, FYI. So the Dell engineering team asked me to take a look at this first pass and script around some things with scripts they provided
Dell-ScottH After I poked around I produced this demo: www.delltechcenter.com/page/scripting+the+dell+lifecycle+controller
Dell-ScottH It's about eight minutes long and gives you a glimpse into the interface. It's hairy, but fun to hack at
Dell-ScottH Erson, you wake up from your nap? :-)
erson Thanks, this is an interesting topic
Dell-ScottH All the scripts I used are available on that same link. There’s a VBScript example and simple .bat examples
erson Just got back from a chainsaw seminar :)
cartershanklin Scott, did you look at doing a PowerShell script too? Version 2.0 has WS-Management built in
Dell-ScottH The .bat examples use winrm, which is included in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and available in Add and Remove Programs for other versions
erson /me would also like some PowerShell love
Dell-ScottH I was hoping that you would write all that after I gave you the CIM link :-)
cartershanklin I don't have a recent Integrated DRAC (iDRAC) :)
Dell-ScottH I'm very, very, very behind on my PowerShell and need to just dig in for a couple of weeks
cartershanklin You can ship me a fancy new server if you want, though
Dell-ScottH Hmmm…sounds like a hardware beg to me :-)
cartershanklin Dumb question here, but what's the authentication model for DRAC? Is it strictly local accounts, or can you integrate with directory services?
erson The latter is possible
Dell-ScottH Both
cartershanklin Okay, good to know
Dell-ScottH Information on WS-Management for those new to the topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384470%28vs.85%29.aspx
cartershanklin I'm seeing stuff around BIOS and inventory; is there a brief summary of capabilities? I'm wondering specifically if any power-type settings are possible
Dell-ScottH I encourage you all to view the demo to get a feel, and then add some scripts of your own (if you have the hardware)
erson Has anyone found any good tutorials on WS-Management?
Dell-ScottH As in power control? Or monitoring?
cartershanklin Erson, no, actually I haven't, unfortunately. I just learned by experimentation
cartershanklin Scott, I see you can restart and stuff like that, but I was thinking more about controlling settings you would otherwise make in the BIOS
erson Scotth, anything really
ChrisMuncy As far as practical usage of DRACs goes, I've got mine on the local server subnet. Would it be best maybe to put them on another subnet that’s accessible from the outside through a virtual private network (VPN) or Secure Shell (SSH)?
cartershanklin Scott, here's the sort of thing I mean: www.boche.net/blog/index.php/tag/dpm/
cartershanklin Enabling power management technology that VMware DPM would take advantage of
Dell-ScottH @chris, I wouldn't put them outside the DMZ. In our lab we have them on separate subnet and then RDP into a management machine to access them all
cartershanklin (Try to ignore that he's using HP hardware) :)
Dell-ScottH Yeah, pretty sure we have that baked in already. We did a Data Protection Manager (DPM)-type demo (before there was DPM). Looking for it now
Dell-ScottH Here's a study where we used DPM in a Dell cluster Web farm with VMware vSphere: http://i.dell.com/sites/content/business/solutions/engineering-docs/en/documents/esx-bundle-capacity-whitepaper.pdf
cartershanklin Okay, just looked at your MOF; looks like power management is covered: www.delltechcenter.com/page/dcim.library.mof
Dell-ScottH Yeah, was digging that link up too
Dell-ScottH So using some of the sample scripts from here: www.delltechcenter.com/page/scripting+the+dell+lifecycle+controller ... and the Dell-specific CIM extensions from here: www.delltechcenter.com/page/dcim+-+dell+cim+extensions
Dell-ScottH You can hack together some interesting solutions. Going forward, we will have pretty graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to front-end them and back the controls into our systems management products—hopefully eliminating the need for monitoring agents on our systems—but I think we are a few years off. This is like step .00001
cartershanklin Scott, reading this I'm not 100 percent sure; I guess the question I would have (and this is probably for the gurus):
Dell-ScottH Ask away; I'll point them back to the transcript and ping you on Twitter
cartershanklin If I set Cim_powerutilizationmanagementservice to 7 (referring to http://media.community.dell.com/en/dtc/attach/dcim_oempowerutilizationmanagementservice.mof) is that in any way like enabling AMD PowerNow technology in BIOS (assuming it's an AMD box)?
Dell-GeneC Just finished your demo in the background. Good stuff...
cartershanklin Or, follow up: is there another value that I could set to do that?
cartershanklin But that's a hard one. Is there any way for me to hook up with someone who could answer that?
Dell-ScottH Absolutely. I can put you in touch with the guy that steers the committee, and more importantly, the guy that drives all the test cases. Shoot me an e-mail with specifics, and I'll introduce you guys in e-mail—scott_hanson@dell.com
Dell-ScottH Especially if it results in some PowerShell examples
cartershanklin Okay. Thanks, Scott
Dell-ScottH …Which will also result in some schwag for you too :-) Okay, that's all I got
cartershanklin Woo hoo, new server!
Dell-ScottH What do you guys got?
cartershanklin Make it a 4 RU please
Dell-ScottH Lol. You jumped the gun a little
cartershanklin With 256 GB RAM
cartershanklin Oh come on, you guys are drowning in servers; they aren't going to miss just one
Dell-ScottH Did I mention that there will be a transcript of this chat? :-0
Dell-ScottH Be sure to join us next week for Kong's topic. Kong, what can we expect?
Dell-KongY The topic will be Microsoft Exchange 2010 and Office Communicator Server. We'll have guest speakers from the solutions engineering team joining our chat next week. These are the engineers behind the recently launched advisor tools as well as the business ready configurations. So please bring your questions :)
Dell-ScottH Alright, thanks to everyone for joining. Great to chat with you all. Have a great rest of the week
cartershanklin Thanks, Scott. I'll drop you that e-mail. See you guys later
Dell-ScottH Okay, bye all
Dell-KongY Take care. Peace out
Dell-GeneC Bye