Running Dell DSET remotely on ESXi

For those using Dell hardware, when you log the job with Dell Support, they’ll ask you to run a DSET report. This collects various information of the server including service tag, all hardware devices, firmware versions etc.
There’s 3 ways to get DSET info.
1) Install DSET locally
2) Run DSET LiveCD
3) Run DSET remotely and create a report on a local server.
Each option has their pros and cons.
The DSET download is available at www.dell.com/dset.

Install DSET locally

This is pretty straight forward. You can do a normal install and keep the software installed, or choose to create a one time local DSET report. Useful if you don’t want to keep unnecessary software on your servers. Doesn’t require an outage/reboot.

Running DSET LiveCD

Get the latest version at http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/ (omsa-71-live). This will boot into a CentOS LiveCD to the graphical user interface with the Dell utils you need on there. You don’t need to know the root password, but it’s “dell”.
Here you can run the DSET util and save it to a USB disk, vFlash, or network share / scp remotely. The DSET output is saved to /tmp/data/.
This requires an outage as it needs to boot from DVD.

Running DSET remotely

So, first we need to install the OpenManageServer Administrator Bundle version 7.4 – you can find that located here.  Go ahead and download the zip file and extract to /var/log/vmware on your host.  Yes, the package will look for that specific path so you will need to be sure it is in /var/log/vmware.  From there we can simply install the vib with the following command

esxcli software vib install -v /var/log/vmware/cross_dell-openmanage-esxi_7.4.ESXi550-0000.vib

Next – DSET

The version of DSET that we will install is 3.6.  The installation for DSET is the standard Next Next type of install – so I won’t go over much of that – just be sure to select both the CIM provider and the collector.  You can find it here.   Once done you are good to go.  Launch a command shell (as administrator) and browse to c:\Program Files(x86)\Dell\AdvDiags\DSET\bin and run the DellSystemInfo.exe command with your desired parameters (example below)

c:\Program Files(x86)\Dell\AdvDiags\DSET\bin\DellSystemInfo.exe -s IP_OF_Host -u root -d hw -n root/dcim/sysman -r C:\DSET.zip

For more info, run dellsysteminfo.exe /h, or just run:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\AdvDiags\DSET\bin> dellsysteminfo.exe -s servername -u root -d hw,st,sw,lg -r c:\temp\servername-dset.zip
Dell System E-Support Tool, Version 3.5.0
@2004-2013 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Please enter “root” password:
* Gathering Chassis information…
* Gathering Software information…
* Gathering Logs…
* Gathering System Summary information…
* Preparing and Compressing Report…
* Saving DSET CIM report to path: c:\temp with report file name: servername-dset.zip

Troubleshooting

Failed to gather Software/Logs data. Check the IP Address and credentials: – Ensure ssh is enabled.
Failed to gather Software/Logs data. Either user is not part of sudoers list or NOPASSWD is not configured – try using the root account.
Some detailed information is missing from the report: reset OpenManage services.

DSET Output

Once the DSET report has been saved, you can send it to Dell Support for investigation. If you’re curious about what’s contained in report, unzip using the super secret password “dell”, and run the dsetreport.hta file.

There you go!  Your Dell DSET log that you can now forward off to support to get your issues looked after.  This certainly isn’t a very difficult thing to do but troublesome nonetheless trying to match up versions to make things work.  Anyways, hope it helps with anyone having issues.