iDrac7 can't watch boot sequence

Question

I have a few oldish Dell PowerEdge servers which I'm planning to recommission as DR servers. I'm able to access one of them currently via it's idrac card and the virtual console seems to work ok.

That said I'm not able to do any bios / disk related config since this happens at boot time and I get disconnected from the virtual console when i reboot the server.

Using our new HP servers with their ILO's in the same way I'm able to do a full config on the pre OS bit of the boot so I figured it should be the same with the IDrac's.

Is there some setting I need to err set to make virtual console work pre os boot ?

I note the server has two LOM NIC's which are disabled in the OS, however they seem to be what's providing the IDRAC network since they're connected to access ports I configured on my switch to a different VLAN to the server. Sorry that's probably a red herring...

Grateful for any suggestions.

Paul.

Answer 1

First off iDrac, iLo and IPMI are related BMC technologies (Baseband Management Controller) however manufacturers limit functionality depending on which license you have installed. iLo allows Bios as Standard, but iDrac requires an enterprise key for bios access. On Dell's it also is dependent on which iDrac revision firmware is installed.

I perfer Supermicro because the only thing you can't do with a management allowed motherboard is Flash the BIOS from remote.

On the network interface it depends on the manufacturer as well but most failover the BMC connection to the first onboard copper port if the management interface is not connected. There is a setting in the Bios usually, and if not, as part of BMC configuration for which port is used. This shadowing on the first port is irrespective of any operating system setting sense The BMC just piggybacks its MAC address on that hardware. The options are usually Dedicated,Failover,Primary. The downside to using primary is your switch has to be able to handle multiple networks on a single port, though often the BMC will offer active VLAN tagging for traffic separation.