Greeting Everyone,

My apologies if this has already been covered, however, I have a question regarding a VMware Server Guest (not the ESX host) and OpenManage.

Is it possible to install OMSA 5.5.0 on a Windows 2003 SP2 VMware server? Just to reiterate, this is NOT an ESX host - it's the guest OS provisioned from our VMware infrastructure.

We use OpenManage to keep track of server details, such as, primary admin, contact numbers, audits (more or less) etc... For this reason, it's beneficial for us to have OMSA installed on VM's.

Thank you for any help you may provide.

Not officially supported, as OMSA is mainly designed for hardware support, and technically a VM has no hardware.

One of our other users on the site has been using OMSA on VM's for purposes like yours. Give it a try if your comfortable falling outside the "official" support arena. If 5.5 won't install you might try 5.4 or 5.3.

"Not officially supported, as OMSA is mainly designed for hardware support, and technically a VM has no hardware.

One of our other users on the site has been using OMSA on VM's for purposes like yours. Give it a try if your comfortable falling outside the "official" support arena. If 5.5 won't install you might try 5.4 or 5.3."

Appreciate the quick response, Scott!

Unfortunately, I didn't have much luck getting either versions of OMSA installed on my VM. I extracted the OMSA .exe's to a directory, then opened a command prompt and ran the following:

msiexec.exe /i SysMgmt.msi

After a few moments, I was presented w/ the following:

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator Installer Information
"This is not a supported Dell Server. Dell OpenManage Server Administrator software can only be installed on supported Dell servers."

Hopefully, the other user that has done this can give me some insight on how he/she got it installed.

Appreciate your help and effort.

Hi There,

Sorry to say that it is not possible to install the OM client onto a VM guest... the only way I have been able to make it work is to install the client on a physical machine and then convert that machine to a VM... this was initially okay due to our ESX environment being so new... but as time goes on, we are creating more and more VMs that do not have the clients installed... currently 83 VMs are monitored, 12 are not...

With any luck, the new version of the Management suite will allow us to monitor VMs as well as physical boxes :)

Thanks,
Stuart.

Appreciate all the replies!

Stooartbaby - I'm like you; I have a few VM's that have OM installed on them, but, in their original state they were physical machines that had OM installed, and then they were P2V'ed - and wahlaa...you have a VM with OM installed.

Hopefully the new Dell Management Console will address this issue. :)

Regards,

"it is not possible to install the OM client onto a VM guest"

simply create a file "c:\nosystemcheck.txt" and start the MSI file ...

Very cool hack, will have to try that out, of course not officially supported :-)

"simply create a file "c:\nosystemcheck.txt" and start the MSI file ..."

I had the same error message ("This is not a supported Dell server"), though the machine actually was a supported Dell server. But it was a strange installation (OS disk was cloned from an older Dell server, then upgraded to Windows 2003; there were remains of older OM versions...)

So I started the installation and watched with ProcMon what it does. And I noticed that it checks if a file "c:\nosystemcheck.txt" exists. So I just created this file, and the installation worked fine.

Maybe this file is created by the PreReqChecker? Didn't verify that. (On my system, the PreReqChecker didn't even start correctly.)

svhelden - very cool! I'm going to give this a try on one of my test VM's this afternoon.

Thanks!