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OMSA is a web based application to manage DELL PowerEdge Servers. Using OMSA you can perform proactive system monitoring, system diagnosis, troubleshoot hardware issues and configure RAID etc., You can also view and manage hardware’s embedded system management (ESM) log using OMSA.

This is an jumpstart guide that explains how to install Dell OMSA on Linux. I have also provided few screenshots of DELL OMSA web application.
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Photo courtesy of B Naveen Kumar

dmidecode command reads the system DMI table to display hardware and BIOS information of the server. Apart from getting current configuration of the system, you can also get information about maximum supported configuration of the system using dmidecode. For example, dmidecode gives both the current RAM on the system and the maximum RAM supported by the system.

This article provides an overview of the dmidecode and few practical examples on how to use dmidecode command.
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When you call DELL customer support for any help, they will ask for either Service Tag or Express Service Code. You also need service tag to download drivers and documentations from DELL support website.

When you have physical access to the system, you can easily identify the service tag affixed on the body of the server. DELL support site shows the exactly location of the service tag and express code stickers for various DELL equipments.

When you don’t have physical access to the server, you can get the same information remotely from the OS level. Using Windows or Linux command line you can easily get DELL service tag as explained below.
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Photo courtesy of wraithtdk

Companies purchase support for most of their enterprise hardwares (servers, switches, routers, firewalls etc.,) and softwares (databases, OS, applications, frameworks etc.,). They spend lot of cash on support mainly for two reasons: 1) To get help from vendors to fix critical production issues 2) To keep up-to-date with the latest version of the software and security patches released by the vendors. In this article, I’ve given 10 practical tips for DBAs, sysadmins and developers to use their hardware and software support effectively.
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If you are managing more than one equipment in your organization, it is very important to document and track ALL information about the servers effectively. In this article, I have listed 36 attributes that needs to be tracked for your equipments, with an explanation on why it needs to be tracked. I have also provided a spreadsheet template with these fields that will give you a jumpstart.
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Expanding the capacity of a server by adding new disk drives is a typical activity for administrator. In this article, let us review how to add two new disk drives to the DELL server and create RAID 1 using “Dell PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller - PERC” configuration utility. This tool is also called as “PERC/CERC Bios Configuration Utility”.
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PERC/CERC Configuration utility from DELL is used to manage the disks on the server and perform several disk related activities. for e.g. Create Logical Volumes with different RAID options, check for the consistency of the disks etc.

During the server startup process, there is an option to Launch the PERC/CERC configuration utility. However sometimes it may be required to view the disk information or perform certain disk related operation without having to reboot the server. In this article, I’ll explain how to launch PERC/CERC configuration utility directly from the RedHat Linux.

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Sometimes it may be necessary to find out whether there are any issues with the memory or other hardware components on a server. Typically it is recommended to perform this kind of test on a server before deploying for production usage. DELL has provided few tools to perform hardware diagnostics on DELL Servers. Let us review “Dell 32 Bit Diagnostics” tools in this post.

This Diagnostics tools can be used on DELL PowerEdge servers and PowerVault. Following items are covered in this post:

1. Download Diagnostics utility from Dell support site.
2. Create bootable CD
3. Execute the memory test
4. Graphics based diagnostics

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