This post was written by Rob Cox of the Dell OpenManage Essentials team
OME Team,
Just this past February we released OpenManage Essentials 1.0.1 along with the launch of our new PowerEdge 12G servers. Together, they brought datacenter management to the next level in terms of usability and features. The positive feedback has been overwhelming and we are grateful to you for using our product and taking time to provide feedback and suggestions.
We kept the pedal down on OME in order to bring you the next exciting set of features as quickly as possible. With OME 1.1 the complete agent-free management story that was introduced in our first release is now realized. Full discovery, inventory, health monitoring, alerting and system updates are supported without having to install additional agents. If you are using Dell PowerEdge 11G or 12G servers, be sure to review this tremendous feature set.
In addition, we’ve taken a lot of feedback that you have provided us on this forum and through our account teams and incorporated it into this new release. You should see a lot of subtle changes that improve the usability of an already great product. We are also refreshing and launching a number of new whitepapers today on Dell TechCenter. We have around twenty whitepapers today dedicated to OME and expect to have closer to thirty by years-end.
Here is a list of some of the new features to look for in OpenManage Essentials 1.1:
- Agent-free hardware inventory for Dell 11G and 12G servers
- Agent-free system updates (e.g., BIOS, firmware) for Dell 11G and 12G servers
- Dell SupportAssist extension for proactive “phone home” hardware issue resolution
- Discover, Inventory, monitor health, and view logs of Dell clients (i.e., desktops, portables)
- Discover, Inventory, and monitor health of Dell Force 10 Switches, Dell PDU and UPS devices
- Discover and collect limited inventory Linux servers via SSH
- Enhanced hardware inventory for ESXi servers with Server Administrator (OMSA)
- Alerts for hardware health status changes (not just when a hardware trap is sent)
- Ability to forward alerts in original format to support tiered event management
- A new command line interface (CLI) for automation of server discovery and grouping
- Calendar style task schedule view
- Group filtering on portal pages
- More configurable portal pages
- Grouped discovery ranges for common protocol settings
- Custom URL launch points to allow user-defined right-click actions on devices
- …and many more...
Again, thanks for all of your feedback. Please continue to post on the forum and keep those suggestions coming. We will have an online tech chat on Tuesday, October 30th at 3PM Central so we can get your feedback and answer your questions on the release.
To find links to the OME 1.1 download and for the latest information on the product, visit the Dell TechCenter page on OpenManage Essentials.
Thanks,
Rob