PowerShell Module for Dell OMSA

PowerShell bindings for the Dell Open Management Server Administration command line interface.

Why does this exist?

This module exists because the only Dell-supported scriptable API to the PERC family of controllers seems to be the OMSA CLI commands omreport and omconfig. The input and output to those commands is character strings. Appropriately converting to and from those character strings is an arcane task. This module exists to provide a single location where the arcane conversions are implemented.

What is implemented?

Parsing of the output of omreport is implemented. Piping the output of omreport to ConvertFrom-OmreportStream produces a stream of sensible powershell objects.

How do I use this module?

First take a look at the stream of character output by omreport in your environment. In my environment, the following command is interesting because it shows information about the 14 physical disks attached to a PERC 710P:

omreport storage pdisk controller=0 

First, get the output of omreport formatted in semicolon-separated-value using the -fmt ssv switch:

$s = omreport storage pdisk controller=0 -fmt ssv

This will put a rather unreadable stream of characters output by omreport in $s.

You can wrap the call to omreport in Invoke-Command to retrieve the stream from a remote computer:

$s = Invoke-Command s01.ad.example.com { omreport storage pdisk controller=0 -fmt ssv}

Now convert the character stream in $s to PowerShell objects:

$disks = $s | ConvertFrom-OmreportStream

$disks now contains a list of 14 PowerShell objects, one for each hard drive in my environment. I can get count the hard drives like this:

$disks.Count

Now that we have nice objects corresponding to the disks, we can do useful things using idiomatic PowerShell. Here is a listing of physical IDs, and capacities:

$disks | Select ID,Capacity

The result looks like this:

ID      Capacity                                                          
--      --------                                                          
0:1:0   558.38 GB (599550590976 bytes)                                    
0:1:1   558.38 GB (599550590976 bytes)                                    
0:1:2   558.38 GB (599550590976 bytes)                                    
0:1:3   558.38 GB (599550590976 bytes)                                    
0:1:4   558.38 GB (599550590976 bytes)                                    
0:1:5   2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:6   2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:7   2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:8   2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:9   2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:10  2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:11  2,794.00 GB (3000034656256 bytes)                                 
0:1:12  278.88 GB (299439751168 bytes)                                    
0:1:13  278.88 GB (299439751168 bytes)

We can retrieve the ID and model of the dedicated hot spares:

$disks | 
    Where { $_.'Hot Spare' -eq 'Dedicated' } | 
    Select ID,'Product ID'

Which outputs this:

ID      Product ID                                              
--      ----------                                              
0:1:4   HUS156060VLS600                                         
0:1:11  HUS723030ALS640