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Good evening, I have searched on DELL Poweredge manual and haven't found answers to my problem, I had bought a few months ago a Dell DRAC5 card to finally power on and off my Poweredge 1950 server when I not need it to work on.

Until today everything ok and Drac works fine but today I had to install more ram on the server so I unplugged the two power cords and I was scary touching the surface of the metal panel, is so hot that I can cook some eggs on it.

I'm afraid I do something wrong maybe in Drac setup but I seen that when I fire the power-off command through Drac the Server doesn't shutdown completely, let me explain better:

  1. I push power-off button from Drac
  2. The server shutdown the OS and the Hardware
  3. On the Fron the LCD keep displaying Poweredge name
  4. On back the two Power Supply keeps ON (I see green light on the back of the server)
  5. LAN NIC 1 remains active (green light)
  6. Drac NIC remain active of course

Now if I touch the front of the server is cold, in the middle is quite hot, and in the back near to the PSU is impossible to keep my hand on, is terribly hot over and bottom.

Is this normal? I have this server at home in an open rack without any cooling units since would cost me the bill too much.

Marcos
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2 Answers2

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when shutting down dell servers there power supplies never fully turn off. They stay in standby mode and have some housekeeping power that the motherboard uses. Because the fans in the supplies are not on in an off server they will become extremely warm yes this is normal. To eliminate this a complete ac power removal needs to be done (switched pdu) as suggested earlier. As for on/off daily operations....servers are normally designed to stay on 24-7 and not power cycled much...so don't have any history for anything that might be effected....time will tell though :-)

steve schultz
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This behaviour is certainly not Ok for your server. I have a few PowerEdge servers with Drac in my room that are ~25C. I would try removing the Drac card and let the server on for a day or so, then check for overheating. If it does, go and check both the PSU. You should also check the temperature sensors inside your server so you know what you are dealing with. Good luck!

Alex
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  • Hi @Alex thank you for the answer, when you say "... go and check both the PSU" you mean extracting them from the server and inspecting them? I don't understand. – Marcos May 29 '16 at 18:01
  • I mean starting the server with only one psu at the time – Alex May 29 '16 at 18:13
  • Hi Alex, I tried if I remove one PSU from the slot the server doesn't start, is this a problem? Or PowerEdge need two PSU to run? – Marcos May 30 '16 at 09:56
  • AFAIK there are 2 PSUs on a server for redundancy. So if one of them dies, the other takes responsibility to power the system. However you should not physically remove the PSU from the server, because there is a sensor on each one and the system will not boot. So try to remove just the power cable from the PSUs one at a time. Sorry for the delay. – Alex May 31 '16 at 05:44
  • Hi Alex, what I did was purchasing on Ebay the APC AP7920, which is a remotely managed PDU. The idea is when I shutdown the server as I don't need it, I will log in to the PDU and power off the two electrical ports. Without the electricity I shutdown completely the server so no heat at all. Just one question in this setup arise, the server PSU can support daily power off and power on as well as a PC/Mac? – Marcos Jun 01 '16 at 08:36
  • Hi Marcos. I did not use a server like a PC(turn it off and on on a daily basis) so it is impossible for me to answer that. My guess is that it depends on the PSU manufacturer and specs. – Alex Jun 02 '16 at 17:37