out-of-band management

[Jerker Nyberg]

Hello all,

It is possible to do out-of-band management over ethernet for the current
generation of Dell servers? (regardless of operating system state)

I am interested in remote power-on, power-off, reset and console (serial
over LAN for BIOS/POST and OS startup).

I am not interested in the DRAC management card - I want the functionality
integrated in the motherboard. According to my technical sales contact at
Dell, the current generation of Poweredge servers support IPMI v1.0 (As a
comparison Intel, Tyan and Sun support IPMI v1.5 on theirs). Is anyone
using IPMI for this kind of out-of-band management? (And if so, why are
people still buying DRACs?)

Regards,
Jerker Nyberg
Uppsala, Sweden.

Links of interest:

 * Intelligent Platform Management Interface:
   http://developer.intel.com/design/servers/ipmi/

 * Intel Server Management:
   http://developer.intel.com/design/servers/ism/

 * xCAT Management Processor HOWTO:
   http://xcat.org/docs/managementprocessor-HOWTO.html