How to Update Catalog and baseline management for your Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000

This video will demonstrate updating procedure of Catalog and baseline management for your Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000.

Hello my name is Rick and I'm a global support engineer at Dell.

Today I'm going to show you how to create a catalog, create a firmware baseline and then deploy that firmware baseline to the devices in your environment.

When you initially log into your MX7000, you're going to see one of two pages. If it is in a group, you're going to see the page displayed here. This is the primary landing page of the lead chassis.

If you are in a single chassis environment, you will simply see that chassis landing page. Once you're logged in, you're going to go to Configuration, Firmware Compliance.

Once you're on Configuration Firmware Compliance, you'll notice that your page is blank. In order to create a firmware baseline, we have to have a catalog as a source of information.

So, we're going to click on Catalog Management. Once you're under Catalog Management, you have the option to add or if you already have one created, you can delete it.

In this case we're going to click add. Once you click add, you're gonna have a new window that pops up. In this new window you're going to provide a name for your catalog and the source.

You have three options to choose from for the source of the catalog. The first being the newest validated stacks available from Dell, this references the validated MX stack.

These are our catalog creations that are specific to the MX7000 baselines, that is in this situation for the time that we're doing this recording the latest available is 1.30.00.

So, if you choose newest validated stack that is what it will compare against. Your second option is latest component firmware versions from Dell.com.

This is the general catalog that will have all of the latest available firmware that's out there. That means that you have the potential when you select this to get firmware revisions that are newer than what is actually validated against the MX 0.8 stack.

Your third option is Network Path. This is when you create a custom repository that you host within your internal environment. If you choose Network Path, please be aware that your share must be either NFS, CIFS, HTTP or HTTPS.

Once you have all that information filled out, you will create the catalog and then test access to that catalog to confirm that it is accessible.

Once it's completed and everything looks good here you're going to click Return to Firmware Compliance. Now that we have a catalog set up, we have the ability of creating the baseline.

Simply click on the Create Baseline option, select your source, select your name that you would like your baseline to be and then click Next. Once you click Next, you have the option of selecting either devices or groups.

In this environment I'm going to select devices. Once you select your option, you're going to click the button. This will pop up a new window that allows you to select whatever devices you would like to have within the baseline.

In this case I'm going to select the servers in the environment. Once you select the servers, there are the devices that you would like to update or check your compliance against. Click Finish.

This will automatically create the compliance baseline report as well as run it against the devices you selected. Once it's run and it's complete, you'll select the baseline and click view report.

This will open up a new window that shows you all of the devices you have selected and whether or not they are compliant. If they are not compliant you will see a red X, if they are compliant it will show a green check mark and if it has the option to downgrade you will see a blue down arrow.

In my environment we're sitting on 1.20.10 and we're going to be updating to 1.30.00. Once you confirm your baseline and current versus baseline version, you can select the devices you would like to update.

In this environment, I'm going to select all of our server components. Once you have your devices selected, you simply click Update Firmware.

Once you select Update Firmware it gives you the option to update now, schedule later, reboot server immediately and stage for next review.

In this case I'm going to go ahead and reboot the server immediately to allow it to go through and update the components. You'll get a pop-up that requests whether or not you want to do this because it will inform you that it will reboot devices.

Once you've created that, you will go to monitor and jobs. You will find the job for the update for the baselines that you've created. Click on View Details. Once you click on View Details, you have the ability of monitoring the job as it runs through the process.