Dell is Linux Friendly

Where I currently work we do not deploy much Dell branded infrastructure. Though currently we have landed a project that I am about to start where the client is supplying all of there own hardware, which just happens to be Dell.

My first thought was great now I have to dig through another enterprise hardware vendors website and go searching for drivers and management tools for there hardware, and this would determine which enterprise Linux Distribution we would be using for the project (though my preference is RHEL being an RHCE).

To my surprise within 5 minutes I had all of the information that I required and a simple and brilliant way to install all of the management tools and there dependencies in a single command.

That is right for those who guessed it Dell have a YUM Repo setup to support all of there hardware this not only covers off things like drivers but also all of the management utilities and there OpenManage software. The great part about this is that by piping in a shell script over HTTP (nifty I know) this will ensure that you are using the correct Repo for the system that you are installing the software on as Dell have taken the time to create a separate Repo for each family of server they provide.

At this time the Repo is maintained by the linux.dell.com community though on the Wiki page this is noted to being changed, so hopefully in the future this is maintained by Dell themselves. In saying this all of the software in the Repos is supported by Dell through you support channel.


The Wiki page is well done with step by step instructions to get it all set up and seems to be very comprehensive. You can find the page that references the Dell Hardware RPM Repo here.

You say that is great but what Linux distros are supported well at this point in time RHEL 4, RHEL 5, SLES 9, and SLES 10 are officially supported, though there is mention of the RHEL 5 setup working for Cent OS and Scientific Linux. The bummer is that they do mention that Fedora and Open Suse have not been tested (also unsupported but I under stand why that is), I would be interested to hear about peoples experience with these community distros and the Dell HW Repo.

What we will be doing seeing that Dell's Repo supports RHEL 5 is add all of this into our Kickstart files for all of the server deployments for this client and this will also make sure that these utilities do not get missed if there is the requirement to rebuild a box. It could also be possible to add into deployments utilities such as puppet ect, though I have not had time to play with that as of yet.

If you would like any advice on how to automate the Repo and utility install please leave a comment or email me at feedback@puredistortion.com.

So once again hats off to Dell and the linux.dell.com community for getting behind Linux and making it easier for System Engineers such as myself to do our jobs. You guys ROCK!

Check out linux.dell.com and linux.dell.com/wiki for all of the great work that dell and the community are doing to support Linux on dell systems there appears to be heaps of great info here.