I was excited when I first installed OpenManage Essentials. Here was a console that would show all of our servers in one console and make it easy to deploy firmware and driver updates. It was fairly easy for me to set up SNMP, discover and inventory the systems.
But, trying to push updates has been an exercise in frustration. OME will often hang a task with a "Failed" status in a "Running" state. Sometimes a task will fail and be reported as "Complete".
Because OME doesn't support 64-bit DUPs, it tries to send a 32-bit NIC update to a 64-bit server. The tasks "completes" "successfully" with the result "This installation package is not supported by this processor type. Contact your product vendor."
Here's the result from a "Failed" task that is still running and will "run" forever:
Update Failure: Unified Server Configurator Failure - Detach USC failure - Detaching a partition has failed
TotalStatus Unknown exception occurred during system update.
TotalStatusMessage Software update in-progress.
I cannot believe how much of a failure OME is. I had high hopes that it would work as well as the Server Update Utility. With SUU, I run it, it lists the updates that are needed, I select to install them, they install, then I reboot the server. Then when the server boots back up, the updates are...wait for it...actually installed! The down side to SUU is that it is a manual process.
Maybe one day OME will actually be able to install updates, or get it right when it tells me if something has installed or not, or get it right to know if something is running or not. Until then, I weep with sadness.
