Dell issues a quarterly Server Update Utility (SUU) image which is used to update most firmware on PowerEdge servers (and some other Dell devices). As I use FreeBSD on my servers (which is not supported by Dell) I have to boot the Dell CDU CD to get a standalone Linux system suitable for launching SUU. Unfortunately, the SUU ISO image has become increasingly bloated over time, and is now too big to either burn to a double-layer DVD or upload to the 8GB vFlash card in the iDRAC. I suppose there’s some method for dealing with this if you’re running a Dell-supported operating system, but us FreeBSD users are left out. Here is a list of the last 4 quarters of SUU images, showing their sizes:

01/03/2014 08:08 AM 7,986,208,768 SUU_740_Q42013_A00.ISO
04/13/2014 08:00 AM 8,434,493,440 SUU_14.03.00_A00.iso
07/26/2014 06:36 AM 9,057,501,184 SUU_14.07.00_A00.ISO
10/21/2014 03:23 AM 9,922,859,008 SUU_14.10.200.117.iso

The main part of the bloat is that the disc contains two versions of every update utility, one for Linux systems and one for Windows systems. Since the CDU provides a Linux system, we can delete all of the Windows files with no impact. I found it easiest to copy the entire SUU DVD to a scratch directory and then delete all the .exe files from the \repository directory. There’s quite a few of them:

F:\repository>dir *.exe
Volume in drive F is SUU743_117
Volume Serial Number is 442E-5D5D

400 File(s) 5,490,684,272 bytes
0 Dir(s) 0 bytes free

Once I deleted these un-necessary files, I burned the remaining files (preserving the directory structure) to a DVD (a single layer DVD is now sufficient) with ImgBurn. There are more Windows files in other directories (for example, a Java runtime) but it isn’t necessary to delete those to get the size below the limit of a single layer DVD. Booting CDU and then switching to my modified SUU disc worked fine, and installed the few updates I was missing on my PowerEdge R710.

I don’t know why Dell doesn’t create separate SUU ISO images for Windows and Linux – it would cut people’s download times in half. Until they decide to do something, the above method should give you a usable SUU DVD.