Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) is a baseboard management controller (BMC) built into Dell PowerEdge servers. iDRAC allows IT administrators to monitor, manage, update, troubleshoot, and remediate Dell servers from any location without the use of agents and out-of-band. It consists of both hardware and software that provides extensive features compared to a basic baseboard management controller.  

Key features of iDRAC

iDRAC is designed to make you more productive as a system administrator and improve the overall availability of Dell servers. iDRAC alerts you to system issues, helps you to perform remote management, and reduces the need for physical access to the system.

Ease of use

• Remote management: Server management can be performed remotely, reducing the need for an administrator to physically visit the server. By providing secure access to remote servers, administrators can perform critical management functions while maintaining server and network security. This remote capability is essential to keeping distributed and scaled-out IT environments running smoothly. Using the GUI, an administrator can perform firmware maintenance and configuration of BIOS, iDRAC, RAID, and NICs; deploy operating systems; and install drivers.
• Agent-free monitoring: iDRAC is not dependent on the host operating system and does not spend CPU cycles on agent execution, intensive inventory collection, and so on.
• Thermal management: iDRAC’s Thermal Manage feature provides key thermal telemetry and associated controls that allow customers to monitor the thermal radiation dynamics and run their environment efficiently.
• Virtual power cycle: With servers increasingly being managed remotely, a means of performing the virtual equivalent of pulling out the power cord and pushing it back in is a necessary capability to occasionally ”unstick” the operating system. With the PowerEdge iDRAC9 virtual power cycle feature, IT admins have access to console or agent-based routines to restore or reset power states in minutes rather than hours.  

Security features

iDRAC offers security features that adhere to and are certified against well-known NIST, Common Criteria, and FIPS-140-2 standards.

• Automatic certificate renewal and enrollment: This feature makes it easy for users to secure network connections using TLS/SSL certificates. The iDRAC web server has a self-signed TLS/SSL certificate by default. The self-signed certificate can be replaced with a custom certificate, a custom signing certificate, or a certificate signed by a well-known certificate authority (CA). Automated certificate upload can be accomplished by using Redfish scripts. iDRAC9 automatic certificate enrollment and renewal automatically ensures that SSL/TLS certificates are in place and up to date for both bare-metal and previously installed systems. Automatic   certificate enrollment and renewal requires the iDRAC9 Datacenter license.
• Secure supply chain: The iDRAC boot process uses its own independent silicon-based Root of Trust that verifies the iDRAC firmware image. The iDRAC Root of Trust also provides a critical trust anchor for authenticating the signatures of Dell firmware update packages (DUPs).
• Authentication: iDRAC offers a simple two-factor authentication option to enhance login security for local users. RSA SecurID can be used as another means of authenticating a user on a system.

Scalable data analytics with telemetry streaming

Using analytics tools, IT managers can more proactively manage systems by analyzing trends and discovering relationships between seemingly unrelated events and operations. iDRAC9 telemetry streaming with over 180 metrics/sensors can provide data on server status with no performance impact on the main server. Telemetry streaming’s big performance advantage is in reducing the overhead needed to get the complete data stream from a remote device. Advantages of iDRAC telemetry streaming include:

• Better scalability: Polling requires a lot of scripting work and CPU cycles to aggregate data and suffers from scaling issues when we are talking about hundreds or thousands of servers. Streaming data, in contrast, can be pushed directly into popular analytics tools such as Prometheus, ELK stack, InfluxDB, and Splunk without the overhead and network loading associated polling.
• More accuracy: Polling can also lead to data loss or “gaps” in sampling for time series analysis; it is usually only a snapshot of current states, not the complete picture over time. You might miss critical peaks or excursions in data.
• Less delay: Data can be severely delayed in time due to needing multiple commands to get a complete set of data and the inability to poll simultaneously from a central management host. Streaming more accurately preserves the time-series context of data samples.

Resources

You can explore the following resources to learn more about iDRAC. Also, you can see for yourself the capabilities of PowerEdge iDRAC in our virtual lab setting.

Tech notes

• Telemetry streaming
• Thermal management
• Improved iDRAC9 Security using TLS 1.3 over HTTPS
• iDRAC9 Virtual Power Cycle
• iDRAC9 System Lockdown: Preventing Unintended Server Changes
• Automatic SSL/TLS certificate enrollment

Benchmark studies by industry analysts

• Deployment with zero touch provisioning
• Automated renewal of SSL certificates
• Telemetry streaming
• Splunk integration with iDRAC telemetry

Videos

• Large scale iDRAC telemetry and integration with Splunk
• Advanced Thermal Management with iDRAC9
• Automatic Certificate Enrollment with iDRAC9
• System lockdown to prevent unwanted drift in server configurations

Other resources:

• Explainer video covering what’s new in the GUI of iDRAC9 v4.0
• Deep dive demo of Server Configuration Profile feature of iDRAC9
• Deep-dive webinar on Telemetry Streaming feature for large-scale server management