Using OpenManage Essentials (OME) combined with OpenManage Server Administrator is a fantastic way to manage your datacenter infrastructure including pushing Dell firmware and driver updates to your devices. OpenManage Essentials 2.0 for the most part works well at pushing updates automatically to servers. Pushing updates to Linux servers is not as straightforward.
OME requires that servers running Linux exchange their SSH certificates with the OME server. If you attempt to push updates to a server running Linux, OME will run the task but the task will fail with the following error:
Results: File deploy command failed to execute with error message: The server's host key is not cached in the registry. The system may not be the same.
Dell has several random posts addressing this issue. Solving this certificate configuration issue is explained in Configuring Dell OpenManage Essentials to Apply Updates to CentOS 6.x Servers.
Even with OME configured to properly connect to servers running Linux, you may run into issues where you find it necessary to install Dell firmware updates manually via SSH. There are two options available for doing this and both are explained here.
Method one:
This method makes use of the OpenManage Server Administrator component firmware update component.
- Connect to the target server via SSH using Putty or a similar SSH client
- At the bash prompt, type:
update_firmware
- Press enter. OpenManage will run a system inventory
Output of update_firmware command. No available updates according to the output.
- If there are updates to apply, they can be installed using this command:
update_firmware --update
Using the above method, you may notice that the update_firmware command may indicate that there are no updates available while OME indicates the need to apply additional updates. In that case, you will need to resort to the second method for applying the remaining Dell updates.
Method two: