Dell PowerEdge Servers Gain VMware Manager Plug-In

Dell is building up its systems management capabilities to make it easier for customers to monitor and manage their PowerEdge servers in virtualised data centres.

Dell officials have announced several enhancements to its systems management portfolio, including the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware’s vCenter, which enables IT administrators to do a wide variety of server tasks – from provisioning bare metal servers, to deploying hypervisors, to updating firmware and BIOS – directly from VMware’s vCenter management console.

Streamlining Systems Management

With data centres becoming increasingly complex, the ability to simplify and streamline such important jobs as managing alerts is an important way for saving an enterprise IT staff’s time and money, according to Doug Iler, senior manager of virtualisation systems management for Dell.

For example, such integration of Dell and VMware management systems can reduce the time to provision systems from as much as 30 hours down to about five minutes, Iler said in an interview with eWEEK. And it is done using tools like Dell’s OpenManage and VMware’s vCenter, which are familiar to the IT staff.

“This is not a big learning curve,” Iler said.

The integration of Dell PowerEdge server management capabilities directly into the vCenter console is a key differentiator over competing offerings from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, which links the management back to its own console, he said.

In addition, Dell is enhancing its embedded systems management capabilities, a move that will make it easier for IT administrators to do such tasks as system deployment and updates, workload migrations and hardware monitoring and remediation. The moves were designed to streamline the processes and make them easier and faster to perform. Customers also get improved remote management through Dell’s latest iDRAC (integrated Remote Access Controller).

Iler said the VMware plug-in is the latest move by Dell in its larger systems management push that will touch on multiple aspects of the company’s portfolio that could include a VMware plug-in for its EqualLogic storage products.

Dell’s management with VMware mirrors its efforts last summer, when the company integrated its hardware management capabilities into Microsoft’s System Center. The company OEM’d the software giant’s Systems Center Essentials 2010 software and offered it to PowerEdge customers.

With the VMware plug-in the cost is contingent on the number of 11^th-generation PowerEdge servers that are being managed via VMware’s vCenter, Iler said. Pricing starts at $299 (£187) for three servers, and goes to $799 (£500) for 10 servers, $1,799 (£1,126) for 50 and $2,999 (£1,877) for 1,000 systems.