Another few things that I didn't see mentioned about Dell's iDRAC8:
- Unlike the DRAC Enterprise on T610/710 series, they are just licenses to turn on the features (upgrade from DRAC Basic/Essentials). This will probably mean that 5 or so years from now, when the R630s are as cheap as the R610s are now, you probably won't be able to buy a cheap DRAC8 Enterprise (upgrade) on Ebay, so you'd want to ensure you buy the server with the DRAC Enterprise license as part of the server
- Part of the DRAC is the Life Cycle Controller. This allows you to do firmware updates from outside any operating system. It can download the updates directly from Dell's FTP server, or you can use Dell's Repository Manager to download the firmwares and put them on your own FTP server (saves bandwidth if you have to update multiple servers). Note that you can also update the firmwares from within the DRAC itself, but you have to feed it the manually downloaded files if you opt for this route.
- The Life Cycle Controller can also help install the operating system. From my limited experience, it really only impacts Windows installs, but it will install the NIC, chipset, raid controller and other drivers during the Windows install. I haven't really installed SuSE or Red Hat on Dell servers, so I don't know if it impacts those OSes, but for VMware I just use the Dell custom image when I am installing ESXi on a Dell server
- If you want to try out the DRAC Enterprise features, there is a Dell message board post that says that you have to call Dell sales and order a specific SKU for a 30-day DRAC8 Enterprise trial. I would assume it is free to entice you to spend the money on the full license. The SKU posted is probably for the US only as their boards are mostly moderated by Dell US employees and rarely have SKU info for other countries.
