IPMI and the Dell PowerEdge

In one of my projects at work, we’ve been debating whether to use ESX 3i (installable) or ESX 3.5 on a large number of Dell servers we’re getting ready to deploy. The advantage of 3i is we can treat the host as more of an appliance (i.e. hopefully fewer patches/maintenance). Downside is monitoring. Since there’s no service console we can’t run the Dell OpenManage agents. Since many of these will end up at sites without on site staff and we don’t want to require someone to log into VirtualCenter(s) and manually check the status of each server we need a way to pro-actively monitor the hardware. The DRAC can send us some alerts, but not at a level we’d like. (ex: It will alert if a Power Supply is disconnected/unavailable, but not if a drive is removed/lost from a RAID array.

When installed 3i can show the status of the hardware it’s running on. The shot below is from a new Dell PE 2950. However some of the HP blades I’ve seen with 3i installed on them have limited information. My assumption is that this requires integration between Vmware and the hardware vendor. Since the 2950 is the first (and so far only) system that is certified to run 3i I expect this to show up on the HP blades at some point in the future.

Unfortunately what it doesn’t allow us to do is to alert when a component has issues (i.e. non “Normal” status). In various discussions about the issue wed talked about looking at IPMI and what it can tell us.

I’ve set up Nagios on a VM running Ubuntu and installed ipmi-tool to poke around. I’ll follow up with a couple of posts on setting up the DRAC card in the dell to allow access via IPMI, as well as what it can/does show us.