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Does anyone know of a third party solution that supports the same feature set as HP's iLo and Dell's DRAC? Or if the product is built in to the server motherboard from companies like Super Micro.

Just looking to find ways to cut costs.

Jeff Atwood
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Cary Golomb
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4 Answers4

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Super Micro itself offers several Out Of Band management cards:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/sim.cfm

These use IPMI to do what they do.

Featuring IPMI 2.0 Server Remote Management

IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) is a hardware-level interface specification that defines a common, abstract message-based interface to platform monitoring and control functions. Providing peace of mind to customers, SIM (Supermicro Intelligent Management) module implements IPMI 2.0 technology to provide remote access, monitoring and administration for Supermicro server platforms. With SIM, server administrators can view a server's hardware status remotely, receive an alarm automatically if a failure occurs, and power cycle a system that is non-responsive.

Community
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sysadmin1138
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iLO and DRAC are just layers built on top of IPMI as well. HP and Dell want you to get hooked on using their products so they can charge you extra for the added features.

toppledwagon
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  • iLO is not a layer on top of IPMI, it replaces the BMC that you find in whitebox systems. However iLO does provide an IPMI interface. – davenpcj Sep 17 '11 at 16:58
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Intel AMT is a motherboard feature found in certain chipsets such as Q67. So if you are looking for a superMicro board with this, then just find out which intel chipsets support Intel AMT, and then look for supermicro boards with that intel chipset. There are some various other requirements as far as what CPU you use, etc.

In a nutshell the motherboard keeps one of the ram chips powered, the northbridge powered(which runs the management interface), the onboard ethernet connection, and an extra flash chip to store settings. So you can connect to the system over ethernet and access the remote managmeent features/power-on/power-off etc.

I am not sure though if this is available in any chipsets targeting servers though, but it is really powerful and would seem to be well suited for servers.

AaronLS
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If you're looking for power management, you can get a managed PDB, like the stuff APC sells. If you're looking for remote console access, then there are various IP-KVMs available that can provide that functionality.

dyasny
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