Server vendors like Dell love Linux as it helps them sell hardware. It is in their best interest to have their servers work well with Linux.
Dell has long had a server management software called Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) which provides a command line and web interface to monitors hardware details and failures as well as has the ability to "plug-in" to various datacenter management platforms like HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, and Novell Zenworks.
Historically OMSA required several binary-only kernel modules for drivers to the system management chips. This meant that if you used OMSA, it would "taint" your kernel rendering your system unsupported by kernel developers (although you could still get support from your Enterprise Linux vendor and Dell).
Today I noticed that Dell OpenManage Server Administrator v5.0 was released. The press release didn't mention this, but digging deeper I discovered this tidbit:
Starting with OMSA 5.0, all necessary kernel components are now fully open source, GPL licensed, and included in kernel.org 2.6.x. This includes the OpenIPMI drivers/char/ipmi/ipmi* drivers, drivers/firmware/dell_rbu Remote BIOS Update driver, and drivers/firmware/dcdbas Dell Base Systems Managment driver. This should make it much easier to install and run OMSA on a variety of Linux distributions (userspace library incompatibilities, if any, notwithstanding).
That is very cool! Well done Dell.
I also found out today that Dell makes it easy (relatively so) to install OMSA via a "unofficial" yum repository. Do any other big hardware vendors have yum repos for their management tools?
Information on the repository is available at: http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/
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