iDRAC Console and PowerShell

Question

I've been working with trying to streamline console access in our environment. We currently have a few dozen Dell PowerEdge servers, half M620's and the other half R620's. All running ESXi on them. What I would like to do is streamline with PowerShell the ability to Console into these servers directly using the iDRAC Virtual Console. Currently we log into the iDRAC through a web browser then have to go through and launch the iDRAC console from there then run the Java applet. It would be much faster if we could streamline that process and just launch the consoles directly from a PowerShell script (i'd create a GUI as well). Another option is using ESXCli and remote in using that command which will give you a GUI from a putty session, but the downside there is SSH has to be enabled and if the ESXi server locks entirely you won't be able to SSH in, you are left to go back through the iDRAC utility and do a reset from there. This is why i'd prefer to use the iDRAC in the first place. The big issue i'm running into is the user name and password for the iDRAC Console. It seems that every console session is given a unique user name and password (randomly generated numbers) and those sessions time out if they are not accessed within a minute or two. I've even created unique users for this process but there are no options for 'console access' - it seems that console access is actually given to a unique user created by the iDRAC at every launch of the session. Does Dell or anyone have a way (other than going through the whole Configuration Manager piece which I've read about) to automate this process of launching Console windows? Is there any way to get a 'hard coded' user to be granted console access? I realize this is more of a 'nice to have' feature, but surely I'm not the only customer that finds going through the entire iDRAC GUI clunky just to get console access on a locked ESXi host. Any input or thoughts are appreciated. Thanks,

nadogmoney · Answer

I haven't done this but probably going with VNC is the best route. Let me know how it goes as I may be interested in doing the same thing.

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/m/white_papers/20441034

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/b/news/archive/2014/02/17/techchat-idrac-enterprise-out-of-band-remote-desktop

esben84 · Answer

Thanks for posting the detailed summary. I have been wondering about the exact same thing. For VM deployment, of course done via PowerShell, we can easily and automatically open console windows upon deployment using the standalone VMware Remote Console application. VM deployment would not be very streamlined if you had to open and log in to vSphere Client or Web Client, and navigate to your VM.

Deploying a bare metal server should be as easy as a virtual machine, but without Virtual Console you're blind to the progress.

I haven't tested these Dell PowerShell CmdLets, but they look promising:

en.community.dell.com/.../7727.powershell-cmdlets-for-poweredge-servers

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