How-to: Configure DELL servers for use with vSphere DPM

Rasmus Sjørslev — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 21:47:00 GMT

One of the neat little feature upgrades in ESX 4 compared to 3.x is that Distributed Power Management (DPM) is now officially supported. In 3.5 it was experimental and the only way to power on your hosts was using WOL. In ESX 4 features like IPMI and iLO are supported, which makes for a more reliable usage.

Enabling IPMI can either be done using the web-interface or the DRAC configuration tool accessible when booting the system.

To enable the feature using the web-interface first log in to the DRAC interface and click on "Remote Access" in the menu to the left and then on the "Configuration" to the right. Scroll down to "IPMI LAN Settings" and check the "Enable IPMI over LAN" checkbox as in the screenshot below:

To enable IPMI over LAN using the DRAC config util boot the server and press CTRL+E when prompted to enter DRAC configuration. Set the "IPMI Over LAN" to "On". Save settings and exit.

When the servers is back up you can configure the ESX to attach to the BMC using IPMI. To do this start the vSphere client and mark the server you want to configure then click the "Configuration" tab, "Power Management" (under "Software") and the "Properties…" on the top right corner.
Enter the username and password used for logging in to the DRAC, the IP of the DRAC and the MAC address. To get easy access to the DRAC MAC address, simply ping the DRAC IP and run arp –a from a Windows command prompt and copy/paste the MAC from there.

After making the changes to all ESX servers in your cluster you are ready to start configuring and using DPM.

Even if you do not have a DRAC in your DELL servers you should be able to configure IPMI using the shared NIC feature. IPMI is standard on most DELL servers even without the DRAC installed.

I assume that the process is very similar if you have HP or IBM servers. If you are having trouble configuring IPMI/iLO properties for those kinds of servers, check that IPMI is enabled.

rasmus sjoerslev : dpm, drac

How-to: Configure DELL servers for use with vSphere DPM