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I used to use Dell solely and moved away from them for a while due to some issues with their not-very-transparent-pricing issues at the time but have started to use them again recently. Luckily I haven’t got full in team Dell as it seems to be more of the same, but worse. Dells way or the highway I think, which I don’t understand when Dells way is harder than the highway! Problems are twofold with this, it doesn’t make any sense for SME’s to even look at Wyse or WMS now as they are pushing this as a solution for enterprise/cloud but even then it still doesn’t work so I’m not sure what the angle is here. I can only assume this is just how arrogant Dell are now, “here give us all your money for this second rate garbage”. No thanks, I’d rather just use Raspberry Pi’s as terminals at this point TBH.
Sounds like something I do for remote support, but I don’t use thin clients. I would generally set up a router and support VPN (Mikrotik device, L2TP/IPSEC tunnel permanently connected for us to connect over whenever) or have some sort of jump box on site, often just a Raspberry Pi would do again with a VPN back to us.
I avoided using the cloud version as I was trying to avoid a monthly cost to this. If I was going to spend more money on it I would rather just invest in hardware that had better management facilities. I still can’t see how the cloud version would work any better than a VPN connected version. I could even just expose my local version to the web but either way the point is the MQTT service tries to connect using NETBIOS and ignores the FQDN so I can’t see how it would work on the cloud version if it doesn’t work outside of local networks. Regardless of any of that the WDA settings on the clients have the FQDN of the MQTT server so the software isn’t doing what it says it should anyway, coupled with the fact even when it does connect on the alternative web port the log is full of errors saying it cannot connect on 443 would suggest this is not a flexible or scalable platform. I have spent days on this and when I eventually just turned the server off it took me minutes to set up the INI files again and no more than 20 minutes to fully set up a WES device. I can easily use this as a master image so in an afternoon I can do for free what WMS wants me to spend money on and spend hours setting up (including all the subtle differences of sub groups etc).
I realise this just looks like a rant (which it is I guess) but I am genuinely perplexed by the existence of WMS. Just hoped someone could show me what I was missing. Appreciate the offer of a call but I think as always I am just too small for Dell to care about. Being able to copy configs would be a good start to saving some of the headache but you can only do that with a licensed version (which is too much for managing a handful of WES devices, and even then it’s not really copy, it’s export/import and the manual makes some contradictory statements on how it works anyway).
What would be better (for me, and I’m sure a lot of other users) would be for WES devices to be manageable with the same INI file method as ThinOS devices.
Why do you need v9? I’ve stuck with 8.6 intentionally just in case I wanted to revert back to INI files (which I have, because even for my 20 odd mixed ThinOS and WES devices WMS makes everything harder).
Not directly addressed in the release notes but reinstalling the Config UI Package is part of the install process anyway (if you read the notes and plan on using Groups & Configs I suppose… technically).
Just updated to WMS 3.5.2 and was giving this another go, updating WES7 clients to the latest version. Currently they are on 6.1.7601 and Merlin is 3.3.2.
As per previous posts I have set DHCP options and Merlin ignores these and instead seems to just look for WDM server (not WMS) so just fails.
There is now a note when I create the job in WMS that says;
“WDA is required to retain connectivity to WMS. Follow the instructions on support to create a custom image which contains WDA”
I thought this had been added to help people in my situation, alas no. The link in the note doesn’t take me anywhere useful (just points to https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-uk/product-support/product/wyse-wms/docs where there is no immediately obvious relevant document or note and a search yields nothing with any guidance or instructions for custom images).
So I am still no further on with this. Why do I need to create a custom image anyway? I’ve downloaded the files from Dell directly so why don’t they just work, and why can’t anyone tell me how to simply apply an update using the tools provided by Dell? If I wanted to create custom images I wouldn’t have picked Dell products and used the Dell Wyse Management Suite.
You’ll have to be a bit more specific with your issues. All my T10D’s connect just fine to all my Windows VM’s so it’s likely to be something in your set up.
I’m fairly certain it was done with DNS but the devices seem a bit picky about when they want to use the DNS records. I have another thread on the updating/registering which I haven’t got any help on as I can’t find the tools or processes required (in a reasonably coherent/usable fashion) so end up having to update WDA manually on the devices and then register it manually if it doesn’t pick up the settings from the DNS. From what I have read I should be able to do all this in one go from the client but I haven’t seen that reliably work repeatably.
WDA agent is updated (to 14.5.1.37). They are not registered to a WDM server, we only run WMS.
After running the migration scripts from the downloads section and getting nowhere I found within the executable there is an rsp script with some unfilled information (WMS URL for instance). There are no guides on how to fill this in or on how to use the migration scripts so I guess they are Dell scripts just rehosted here that don’t actually work?
After pulling various files together of my own and making my own Windows batch script I can now update WDA on the WES7 machines and register them to the WMS server. Seems the commands I found mentioned on other sites to do it all in one go don’t work and WDA never gets properly installed.
I assume these migration scripts are meant for WDM registered devices? IS there no simple way of updating/installing WDA and registering it to a WMS server? Seems you have to do it pretty much manually.
Ah OK. The manual doesn’t make this clear, and WMS allows you to create the groups without tokens suggesting it is optional.
This note from the WMS Admin Guide suggests I don’t have to use tokens in a private cloud, hence the confusion.
> NOTE: For a public cloud, the group token for an unmanaged group must be enabled to register devices. For a private cloud, the group token for an unmanaged group is automatically enabled.
Again, just to answer my own questions and so people don’t end up like https://xkcd.com/979/
> The old Wyse WESMigrationUtil.exe is now the Dell WMS_Import_Tool.exe I believe?
No. WMS_Import_Tool.exe does not run on WES7P. WESMigrationUtil.exe is not on the Dell site for download (that I can find) but it is packaged with the WES Migration scripts in the downloads section here so can be extracted from that to use to upgrade WDA on WES7P clients to get them on WMS.
> I assume they need unpacking or putting somewhere else?
No. Just download them then copy them to the zipped folder (as per the tooltip in WMS) but change the extension from exe to zip. WMS will then import them.
Answering my own questions here again! The migration scripts were confusing me, you need to use the tool but again Dell changing the names of everything is confusing. The old Wyse WESMigrationUtil.exe is now the Dell WMS_Import_Tool.exe I believe? WMS has the script included when you add the local repository so you just need to use the above WMS_Import_Tool.exe to upgrade WDA on the WES clients?
The images on the Dell site for WES7 & WES7P are downloaded as .exe files, adding these to the folder that the WMS help says to add them to results in them being rejected. I assume they need unpacking or putting somewhere else? I need these files to be able to reset the terminals to defaults from what I have pieced together.
