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I have a poweredge 2950 server with a drac card that supports ipmi that i have set to share the connection with one of the nics but has a separate ip address. It is running esxi as the os and I was wondering how i can use ipmi or other services that that card might offer that o don't know of to use wol as well as the services that ipmi offers in windows. Sorry if this is a stupid question, i've just been looking on google forever and can't find an definite answers. It seems that ipmi tool is the most used and documented one several but i can't seem to get it to work in windows so if you have other options i'm open to them as well.

Thanks a ton for your help :D

yoyomommy
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2 Answers2

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The IPMI port operates independently of the OS. For convenience's sake you can think of the DRAC card as connecting to a simple switch that also connects to the actual NIC and to the outside world. There are a few ways to approach your configuration, depending on how you have ESXi set up:

1.) If the interface is already in use by VMW w/VLAN tagging then the best answer is likely going to be to go into the IPMI setup during POST (i.e. the "Hit Control-E in 5 seconds..." prompt) and set the shared interface to use a VLAN tag. You'll also need to configure the upstream switch to allow this VLAN.

2.) If you have VLAN tagging enabled on the ESXi interface but don't want to configure VLAN tagging on the IPMI interface then you can likely configure your switch to hand off untagged frames to a given VLAN (also known as a native VLAN).

3.) If the interface isn't otherwise using tagging then configure the IPMI port to have an IP in the same subnet.

rnxrx
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  • Okay thanks for the help there. I was also having issues connecting to the IPMI using windows. Do you know of any way to do this? – yoyomommy May 20 '12 at 05:17
  • Are you asking about an IPMI tool for windows or about a connectivity problem? – rnxrx May 20 '12 at 05:26
  • IPMI tool for windows. Sorry for the ambiguity. – yoyomommy May 20 '12 at 05:51
  • Check out ipmitools on sourceforge - basic interface but quite solid. Also look at Dell's Openmanage suite and, odd as it sounds, Supermicro's client (http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/IPMI.cfm) which seems to work fine on my Dells. My personal favorite, though, is the IPMI app for the iPad - great visibility into the server and the ability to toggle power. Similar tools likely exist for Android. – rnxrx May 20 '12 at 12:38
  • Thanks for the suggestions of the other tools except ipmitools, they look like they should work (as well as the iPad app). Do you know if there is any way to get ipmitool to work in windows though since you mentioned it? Thanks for the help! – yoyomommy May 20 '12 at 16:15
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If you're running vSphere 5 then this will probably help. Installing DOMSA using VUM (VMware Update Manager) is by far the easiest, but if you don't have VUM then one of the other methods should work.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/65_02/ESXi_ts/esxi5_ts.pdf

joeqwerty
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