Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Horizon View Dell OpenManage manual install via esxcli


If you have Dell OpenManage vib and wish to install it via the shell, you'll see something like this on various sites and blogs:

esxcli software vib install -d OM-Srv....zip  
in some older articles you'll see --depot instead of -d as well

It is quite fussy about paths, it won't work even if you're in the directory containing the zip file, you still need to reference the full path. I had a 4 hosts to run this on so I copied from shared vSAN data store to /tmp and ran it on each as so:

esxcli software vib install -d=/tmp/OM-SrvAdmin-Dell-Web-9.1.0-2757.VIB-ESX65i_A00

Note I've added in an equals sign. I suggest putting a space before OM and hitting tab, as it won't otherwise autocomplete which is annoying. Then delete the space after using ctrl and left cursor to jump back quickly.

Hope this saves somebody a few mins of messing. There is a method for adding all of this into vCenter as a converged package but it's a licenced paid extra from Dell. There's also a graphical method of doing this via Update Manager in ESXi using an online pull method from http://vmwaredepot.dell.com/  which probably scales better but it may force automatic maintenance mode where that isn't strictly required to install this vib.