I saw a few places mention that IPMI is a subscription based feature a lot of the time. What’s the deal here? Is this the norm for server/workstation motherboards or only from specific vendors?
In the old days, the BMC (that provides IPMI) was an optional add-in board, which cost a bit of money to purchase.
These days, everything needed is built-in to the motherboard of mainstream servers for the past decade, with some features disabled and requiring you to pay an extra license fee to enable them (but It’s a one-time fee, not a “subscription.”). However, basic IPMI is usually enabled, no extra cost.
But be careful that you know what IPMI is… Check out ipmitool to see all the options. Some vendors conflate their extra added features with the rest of the “IPMI” features and confuse a lot of people.
With both Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant servers, IPMI is available with no extra license (just needs to be enabled in the BIOS), but the graphical video console, virtual media, and the physical iDRAC port may be disabled, requiring instead that you share one of the NICs (with or without VLAN tagging).
IPMI does provide an “SOL” virtual serial console to give you out-of-band management, which works like normal with Linux or provides EMS under Windows.
With the competition between server vendors, more and more extra features (that aren’t just basic IPMI) are being included in the base systems without a license. See:
Or for HP iLO:
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=sd00001039en_us&page=GUID-D7147C7F-2016-0901-0853-000000000494.html
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Does supermicro still have that horrid setup where they limit updating the system bios to the worst possible bullshit (having to boot from a FreeDOS flashed USB drive) in order to charge you another $25 and weeks of waiting for the sane option of doing it through the IPMI?
If so, then Reverse Engineering Supermicro IPMI – peterkleissner.com will be relevant.
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I built my own AMD Epyc on an AsRock Rack romed8-2t mobo and it has good IPMI and lastly it is fully free.
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Has anyone had issues with ipmitool not running or enabling in proxmox 8.1?
It installed but wiil not diable auto setting on my dell XC730xd-12. Idrac 8 & 9 ent. Will not spin down any fans lower than 96%. Lifecycle has them set in the thermsls to 23%, and power management is minimal to performance. Any suggestions? At 23%, I am able to keep the exhaust temp to 38C for 4800rpms. Now that I have install the lasest ver of Promox all idrac setting have gone south!
This is a R730xd just hypervised web appliance. I could use some advice as I have tried installiing proxmox ver6,7,now 8.1 the latest and get the same issues. I also changed out my Idrac card. And imported the config file. Then i resett it to factory, and changed just the ip user and fan states only. Same results.
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