ITA to push firmware, SW and run compliance reports

[Dirk]

All,

It seems to me that very few people are running ITA. Everybody installs 
OMSA to be able to monitor the HW, but almost nobody talks about the 
benefits of ITA.
Although ITA can be used to monitor the HW, I would not recommend using 
it for that purpose as tools like Nagios, Zenoss or HP OV  will do a 
much better job. The real ITA benefit IMHO is the ability to run 
compliance reports and push firmware updates and SW packages out to your 
servers. In addition one can gather performance metrics with ITA and run 
scripts from a central location across the systems of your choice while 
capturing the output.

In the environment I work, we have about 150 servers (mix of 2550, 2650, 
2850, 6650 and 6850 with W2k, W2k3 and Ubuntu server 6.06 LTS) and we 
don't waste time running around with floppies to flash the firmware; 
instead we install the OS and OMSA and then push out the latest firmware 
and drivers using ITA.

The only downside of ITA is that it is Windows only; there is no Linux 
version unfortunately.
One thing to be aware about is that there are 2 SUU images (Software 
Update Utility CD's that hold the latest firmware and drivers for all 
Dell servers):
- one for Windows systems 
(ftp://ftp.dell.com/sysman/OM_5.2.0_SUU_WIN_A00.ISO)
- one for Linux systems (ftp://ftp.dell.com/sysman/OM_5.2.0_SUU_LIN_A00.ISO)
One would assume that if you are just interested in the latest firmware 
it does not matter what SUU you are using, but ITA will not push 
firmware to Linux systems if you have the Windows SUU and vice versa.

Dell ITA can be downloaded here:
ftp://ftp.dell.com/sysman/OMI-MgmtStat-WIN-510_A00.exe