Best way to manage 20+ IPMI servers

[EloquentSrv]

Hi,

We have many servers with IPMI but different brands. Each server has some IPMI 2.0 compliant interface. I tried the article I found here on IPMIview but it only does kvm for Supermicro not other brands like Dell and ASUS.

I'd hope someone here has found a better solution. Here's what I want:
1. (ideally) discovery on the network
2. ability to save IPMI servers to list and give each a unique name
3. easy way to see which ones are up and have alerts across population
4. ability to launch kvm and remote disc mount

What are you using?

 

[dba]

I'll be following this thread to see what's out there.

I did find a nice simple tool for managing server on/off via IPMI on the iPhone: IPMI Touch.

 

[EloquentSrv]

Does IPMI touch only do ON/OFF or can it also do KVM?

 

[dba]

Does IPMI touch only do ON/OFF or can it also do KVM?

It's just for monitoring and basic control via IPMI - on/off, fans, temperatures, and sensors. No KVM, which is why I'm interested to hear if there are any other solutions available.

 

[wyluliraven]

If you have various vendors in your camp, have you considered loading OpenIPMI to address them all?
OpenIPMI

Also, having a dedicated switch for IPMI networks is a good practice. You could do IPMI IP assigned at the switch level to keep things simple, or use DNS.

 

[TangoWhiskey9]

Would this work? ASUS Exclusive Innovations

 

[Chuckleb]

With the recent CERT advisories about IPMI and other OOB technologies being vulnerable due to being out of date, it is best to isolate IPMI regardless. For production, we keep all of that on a non-routable network that requires VPN anyway.

Isn't OpenIPMI commandline? I think the OP is looking for iKVM as well. CLI is definitely nice for scripting though.

I think the ASUS one was limited to the Aspeed-based IPMI so but sure if it is universal. I should fire it up.

 

[MiniKnight]

I don't think openIPMI works with KVM. I use OpenIPMI on lots of servers though.

Hey, what about SuperDoctor Manager 5 Supermicro SuperDoctor® 5

Look near the bottom. I've never tried this. I dunno if it's free. But maybe something to look into.

 

[Mike]

I don't think KVM is a part of the IPMI standard but merely a hack to tunnel display output over the IPMI connection. See if console redirection works through cli?

 

[Chuckleb]

So here's the best answer that I can give.

I tested a whole bunch of IPMI management tools and I find the IPMI View to be the most useful of them. This is available at: ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/utility/IPMIView/ and I recommend just grabbing the JAR file and running that. It's relatively cross-platform (Java). It meets the first 3 criteria that the OP wanted with the exclusion of a universal KVM tool. It does a decent job scanning the network for discovery and auto-naming what it found if you have DNS names. You are able to group similar machines together and monitor them as a group as long as they have matching username/passwords. The datafile is simply a text file (IPMIView.properties) that can be edited in case you need to make mass changes to IPs/names. If you choose to save username/password, the password is encrypted in a separate file.

Officially the IPMI spec is for monitoring and remote controls (Intel Doc) and the iKVM features are vendor specific and optional. This requirement may be pretty hard since there are lots of implementations from Java to ActiveX based, or a thick client requirement.

Some of the other tools mentioned may require an agent on the machine so they are really not out-of-band type tools.

Lastly, here's also a good comparison of CLI-based toolswhich could allow good scripting and then dumping out to web clients. I was playing with collectd to pull sensors and IPMI stats to display quickly for example. Not scalable but was for fun. I also noticed that Zabbix and other tools can do monitoring of IPMI.

I have screenshots of the IPMIView app (click to embiggen).







Haven't given up yet, we may see a universal iKVM/remote media/etc in IPMI 5.0 yet

 

[Patrick]

I have been using IPMIview for a long time now. Here is the IPMIview walk-through with lots of pictures.

My model now is scan using IPMIview, then use the IP address to get to the specific machine.

 

[Chuckleb]

Ha, I should learn to search first . Good walkthrough.

 

[Patrick]

Ha, I should learn to search first . Good walkthrough.

2010 ServeTheHome! 3+ years old so an eternity in search terms!