During my years as a VMware sysadmin I got to do quite a bit of hardware work with firmware, drivers, compatibility and so on. But since I transition to the cloud native world this part of IT has moved further away from me for obvious reasons. Now lately I am getting back into this as part of a project at work around bare-metal and I figured I would use my Dell R430 for the first POC. Which includes upgrading firmware on the machine.

I used to have a VM with Dell OpenManage Enterprise to upgrade everything quick and easy but I wiped my ESXi disk and I couldn’t really be bothered reinstalling it since this machine will be wiped completely and I won’t be using ESXi at all so I thought I’d just upgrade the firmware manually.

Dell firmware upgrade with Lifecycle Controller

There are several methods to upgrade firmware on a Dell server but I went with the Dell Lifecycle Controller option for the sake of simplicity. We simply boot on he lifecycle controller and pull all the firmware from the Dell website.

I just wanted to run through the steps here because the online documentation is a bit lacking and I’m pretty sure I will have forgotten all about it by the next time I want to do this again.

• First, let’s boot in the lifecycle controller by pressing F10

• The prerequisite for all this is to have internet access so you’ll need to go into settings and make sure the server has an IP either statically or via DHCP.

• Select Network Share.

• Select HTTPS and type in the Dell website where the catalog is stored: dl.dell.com.

Note that many online resource will mention the downloads subdomain but this won’t work as Dell seems to have sneakily changed it at some point. Full disclosure, I found this information from a random post on the Dell forum (thanks Dell for the doc…).

• Make sure it still work by using the Check connection feature and accept the invalid certificate.

• If everything goes to plan you should now have a list of firmware you can upgrade.

• After you hit apply your firmware should start getting downloaded and installed onto your system.

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