Questions about monitoring Dell servers

[Bill Moran]

On Tue, 16 May 2006 12:33:50 -0400
Jason Lixfeld <jason+lists.freebsd-questions at lixfeld.ca> wrote:

> I've got a couple of Dell PowerEdge 1850s, one of which has FreeBSD  
> 6.1-RELEASE on it.
> 
> I'm trying to figure out the best way to monitor these boxes.  I'm  
> interested in RAID status more than anything else, but I'd like to  
> get as many of the sensors working as possible.

If it's the right type of driver, the megarc port might be helpful.
Works on our Dells.

> What I'm confused about is the difference between IPMI, Open Manage  
> and DRAC.

DRAC = console over network
IPMI = hardware monitoring
Open Manage = I have no clue

> I don't quite understand what does what, and how FreeBSD  
> support is for either of these options.

DRAC is irrelevant to FreeBSD.  Configure it in the BIOS (give it an
IP and the like) and you can use a web browser to get a console window.
(True console, so that you can access the BIOS during boot and
everything).

> I tried and failed to get  
> IMPI working, I tried to setup linux compatibility to get Open Manage  
> working (which I assume is the osabmcutil RPM) but I couldn't.

Install ipmitool and use it to access IPMI over the network.

We have a central machine that monitors all our servers via a Nagios
plugin to ipmitool.  I can't offer any advice on getting OpenIPMI
working.

> And  
> I'm not sure if any of these is dependent on the DRAC card or if the  
> DRAC card and these options are mutually exclusive and the DRAC card  
> just does "some other cool stuff"(tm).

DRAC and IPMI are completely seperate.  There is some overlap, for example
both DRAC and IPMI can be used to monitor sensors and reboot the hardware.

DRAC is nice in that it gives you a spiffy web interface, as well as the
whole console over IP thing.  IPMI is nice because it's a standard that
can be programmed to, with ipmitool, for example.

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.