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Boppity Bop
Asked: 2012-05-23 06:55:09 +0800 CST

How IPMI works on Dell R210 server?

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I have Dell R210 1U server (W2008R2 Enterprise).The box is currently in another country on colocation. I am thinking of moving it to another colocation.

I was told that if my box supports IPMI I could power-cycle it remotely in new environment. I have no idea how IPMI works..

Do I need to set something in the Bios? in Windows? Do the colo provider connect something physical to the box to make it work (a cable?).

How would you go about it if the box is only accessible through RDP? And you wanted to ensure IPMI will work and also to ask all the right question before move (because their 'remote hands' are very expensive).

electrical-power ipmi dell-poweredge windows-server-2008-r2

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    On a Dell, it's the iDRAC. Read the manual for the hardware you've bought, focusing on the features and requirements for the iDRAC on the model you own. Some have their own NIC that needs to be cabled, some will share a system NIC. Either way, you'll need to get an IP address on that card, which will be a manual process, unless they give you DHCP (unlikely in someone else's colo, but maybe they'll work with you on this.)

    Then, once the iDRAC is running, you can HTTPS or SSH into it and power-cycle your server on your own, as often as you need to.

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  2. iDRAC BMC is not like the old DRAC, is the like the old BMC, with this you have a limited functions like start/stop server, get the logs,... You can configure it with OMSA (I think) and during the boot at the end of the post, I think is CTRL+E, in the BMC BIOS you can configure an IP to access BMC but is going to be available only through commands or through an external application that run IPMI commands, is not accesible through web administration.

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  3. You should install OMSA 6.5.0 on your system. There you get a lot of command-line-tools.

    One of it is racadm wich will allow for setting up the IP of your DRAC-card (iDRAC6 Express if you did not buy the Enterprise-license).

    BTW - if nothing else is set - the default-IP is 192.168.0.120/24.

    With iDRAC6 Enterprise you get virtual media and a virtual console plus a dedicated line (if you want to use that) for your iDRAC6.

    Other command-line-tools installed with OMSA: omreport, omsetup. OMSA will also install a management gui on your server, running on https, port 1311.

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