m1000e chassis fans

You can verify the fan speed in the CMC, the max is around 10000rpms. Or you can use OpenManage Essentials (OME) to set up SNMP alerts.

You can find OME here -

Let me know how it goes.

We have an M1000e and the fans jump up to 9045 rpms for no reason.  Chassis only has 4 blades in it.  No errors in the CMC or logs.  Don't understand why all of a sudden they increase.  They were running this way when co-worker arrived.  He shutdown the blades to make it stop.  Now it is doing it again.  Sounds like a jet engine running.

Yes all slots are filled with a device or blanking panel. We have narrowed it down to the server in slot 7.  We turned the other 3 off one by one. turning off the one in slot 7 returned the fans to normal speed.  Not sure if it is the server or the slot. My co-worker has a chat with Dell support for this issue and they are checking firmware levels.

Is the Blade a M610x? If so, do you have L5640 processors installed?

Do you have all the slots )Blade, fan, cmc, kvm, switches, etc) filled? So no openings on the chassis. The fans will max out to try to increase flow to cool the hardware.

Let me know.

Hi Chris,

What has that combination got to do with chassis fan speed? How are the two related?

We have the same symptoms in one of our fully populated chassis (and we cannot turn off teh servers now).

Thx,

John Bradshaw

The issue could be that the enclosure is out of date.  Which with that combo you need the enclosure to be up to date.

What versions are you at on the CMC, as well as the Blades BIOS and iDrac.

Here's the links to the updates -

CMC -

BIOS - www.dell.com/.../poweredge-m610x

iDrac - www.dell.com/.../poweredge-m610x

Let me know what you see.

Thanks.

We have m620 with E5-2680 processors.  We has just updated the firmware on all the servers and that may have resolved the issue.  It is wait and see at this point.

Hi Mike,

Did the issue resolve, as we have 2 chassis now where the fans are going crazy about every hour for 10 mins?

Thx,

John Bradshaw

No we are still having issues with ours too. We tried failing over to the other CMC but we still continue to see the same issue with the fans going full tilt.  The only thing that has changed is how they ramp up.  Now it speeds up half the fans at once then brings the others up to full speed one at a time.  These seem to come up to full speed slowly as opposed to all of a sudden.

Did you ever get a resolution to this?

How did they isolate the offending server?

Thanks, I migrated a lot of blades over from another M1000e and now my fans run fast all the time on that one enclosure.  Funny thing is, it was all fine until I moved the blades to different enclosures.  Looks like I'm going to have to open up another ticket with Dell...

Yes it was one of blade servers out the 4 in it.  Dell tried swapping some parts of server and when that didn't work they swapped the whole thing.  That finally fixed it.

Dell released version 4.40 for the chassis firmware.

Incorporated in that release is a racadm command to change the minimum level for the fan speed.

e.g.

After applying this firmware version to the chassis (4.40 or above), the minimum fan speed can be adjusted, via a putty session, by the following (example changes fans to 50% max):

racadm config -g cfgThermal -o cfgThermalMFSPercent 50

To see what the fans are then doing type:    racadm getsensorinfo

I know it's not really a fix, but it gets past the problem of fans ramping up to jet engine noise levels so that working near them becomes a nightmare. What this does (for us) is keep the temperature down to <60degrees C so that the fans do not ramp up to >9000rpm