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Virtuose
Asked: 2013-09-10 01:33:32 +0800 CST

What is the difference between IDRAC, IPMI and ILO?

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I sometimes hear my colleagues talking about IDRAC, IPMI and ILO, when restarting a server. It seems that those terms are often misused.

For instance, is there a difference between saying that you connect to IPMI and IDRAC?

If I well-understand, IDRAC and LILO are ipmi-based tools respectively implemented by Dell and HP, bringing new functionalities?

ipmi

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    These are all forms of out-of-band management. IPMI is a standard. DRAC is a proprietary offering from Dell. ILO is the HP ProLiant variant. ILOM for Sun/Oracle. In some cases, you may hear the terms used interchangeably.

    The proprietary lights-out management solutions provide more integration with the hardware and often time have nicer features (monitoring, logging, access) than a generic IPMI implementation.

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  2. I would like to point out that IPMI or Intelligent Platform Management Interface is an open, industry-standard interface that was designed for the management of server systems over network. It enables you to monitor and control your server platform, as well as to retrieve information about your server platform is a standard. It supports FRU inventory reporting, system monitoring, logging of system events, system recovery (system reset or power off) or alerting.

    But what is more important is that all of the aforementioned service processors - iDRAC, iLO or ILOM - are compliant with this standard (or with a specific version of it) so you can either use vendor specific tools to communicate with them or standardized IPMI tools. This may be an advantage when you need to integrate the platform with some monitoring system which supports IPMI standard but not a specific service processor.

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  3. Old question but ... ;

    • IPMI - Intelligent Platform Management Interface ( General Standard )
    • IDRAC - Integrated Dell Remote Access ( Dell )
    • ILO - Integrated Lights-Out ( HP )
    • IMM - Integrated Management Module ( IBM )

    These embedded server management technologies allow a system administrator to monitor and manage servers and other network attached equipment by remote control regardless of whether the machine is powered on or whether an operating system is installed or functional.

    For laymen, they are similar but for technical people they are different. So pls dont use them interchangebly if you are troubleshooting faulty hardware. Be specific.

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