XenServer 6.1, Dell OpenManage and SNMP

I finally updated our productive environment to XenServer 6.1. The upgrade went without a hitch, but there are still many issues with Windows VMs and the XenTools. In the end completely removing the XenTools and reinstalling them did the trick.

Anyway, this post is about Dell OpenManage and SNMP. I've found a spot-on post in the Citrix forums here - thanks Josh Phillips. Read on for the details.


Those are the exact steps:

1. Follow the steps in the Dell OM 7.2 Linux repository:
   wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/hardware/latest/bootstrap.cgi | bash
   yum install srvadmin-all
2. The latter command complanis about missing dependencies (e.g. libxslt.so.1 ) so let's enable the CentOS-Base repo to fix it. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and change [Base] to "enabled=1".
3. yum install srvadmin-allThis will now proceed.
4. Firewall adjustments - I'm always extra extra careful when messing with iptables rules. It's just too easy to make a typo and lock yourself out. I'm much more comfortable by making those adjustements in the system-config GUI.
   Note: The default putty console window size is too small to show the whole dialog, at least on my XenServers. So I had to resize it before running the command.
   Also if window borders look weird, make sure to change Putty Translation options to UTF-8.
   
1. Run "system-config-securitylevel-tui"
2. Go to "Customize"
3. Go to the text box "Other Ports" in "Allow incoming". Append the following strings. Please note the comma!
1. ,1311:tcp
   This is to allow access to the OMSA web interface
2. ,161:udp
   This will allow incoming SNMP requests
5. XenServer snmpd is quite restrictive by default. In our environment it's ok to respond to all requests, read-only. We do this by adding the line "view systemview included .1" after the line "view systemview included snmp" in /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf.
6. Now restart snmpd by running:
   service snmpd restart
7. And let's start Dell OMSA by running:
   /opt/dell/srvadmin/sbin/srvadmin-services.sh start

Make sure you're able to log in to the web interface on https://<server>:1311. Also your XenServer host should now respond to any SNMP queries.
The whole process takes less than 10 minutes, depending on your internet connection. About 200MBs need to be downloaded. The XenServer does not need to be rebooted!