Just like the people who have a Homelab, I'm scared about losing servers / datas and not having the information of a futur potential disaster.

So I installed OME (OpenManage Entreprise) to monitor all of my Dell servers. I choose OME because I want something that I could use in my professional life.

The first problem is that Dell didn't provide an image for Proxmox.

Download the image

You need to go on this URL and complete the form : https://marketing.dell.com/en/OpenManageEnterprise

These are false informations for the guide, I'm not bob

This finally gives us access to this loved download button



We're looking for the OVF format



Uncompress & convert

We need to install unzip on Proxmox

apt-get install unzip unzip openmanage_enterprise_ovf_format_3.1_X02.zip\?uid\=3643957f-581f-42c6-283d-3dc20245b4f7\&fn\=openmanage_enterprise_ovf_format_3.1_X02.zip



2 files are interesting to us



The OVF file told us lot of informations, the VMDK used to deploy the VM and the populatedSize of the VMDK disk



VMDK to QCOW2

The qemu-img command is pre-installed on Proxmox, and can be used to convert (with the convert option) the "disk image filename" to another disk image format.

And here's most used format supported by the convert option

Image format Argument QCOW2 (KVM, Xen) qcow2 VMDK (VMware) vmdk VHD (Hyper-V) vhd raw raw VDI (VirtualBox) vdi QED (KVM) qed

We have a VMDK used in VMware product (ESXI for exemple), we can convert it to qcow2

qemu-img convert -f vmdk openmanage_enterprise.x86_64-0.0.1-disk1.vmdk -O qcow2 OpenManageEntreprise-3-1.qcow2

Result of the command



Web interface - Proxmox, VM creation

I don't know why, but you cannot import a hard disk in the Proxmox VM creation, so we're gonna create a "fake one".

Create a new VM (a normal VM in many ways)



Chose a name



Do not use media for OS installation



Create a 2 GB qcow2 disk



2 KVM cores



3072 GB of RAM, 4 would be better but I don't have so much RAM on my Proxmox



If you can't create a qcow2 hard disk it's because you need to enable the disk image content on your storage



Disk replacement

Now, we need to replace the disk created for this VM, first let's see the mounted point of the storage



We did a little tree command and we see our VM with the ID 124



We replace the disk created by the Proxmox WEB interface by our new converted QCOW2 disk by using a cp command (to conserve a copy of the initiale QCOW2 file) :

cp appliance/vmx/ovf/OpenManageEntreprise-3-1.qcow2 /var/lib/vz/images/124/vm-124-disk-1.qcow2

Now, we start the VM and ...



The first boot will take a while



After this, you will need to configure the Appliance



It's been ... 10 days, and no complain about OME, it works fine, I just need some more servers to use it at his full potential 😝