Reusing DRAC or ILO boards?

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Stonent

New Member
Dec 16, 2016
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Has anyone managed to get any PCI or PCI Express based DRAC/iDRAC/HP-ILO (or other) boards working in any capacity in a system in which they were not intended? Many of the older boards are cheap on the used market but some interface over a secondary bus as well as the PCI or PCI Express bus.

The DRAC 4 board has a PCI interface along with a ribbon cable and goes for pretty cheap. It has an onboard ATI graphics chip so I assume that the video is not travelling to the board from the motherboard.

I'm not concerned with the remote power on ability, I can already do that with Wake On Lan and it works.

If anyone has any of these kinds of boards, can you stick one in a non-server and post what if anything it does without the extra stuff connected?

Incidentally, I've seen a Lantronix Spider Duo IP KVM in use before and was impressed that it allows you to mount an ISO for remote OS installation just like a DRAC can do.
 

cheezehead

Active Member
Sep 23, 2012
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The Dell/HP/IBM branded ones likely won't work. 3rd-party external ones can be moved from system to system. Lantronix Spider's are nice because they include the IPKVM + power control in a nice package. Otherwise you can also look into pairing something like a Raritan KX2 series with a switched PDU to accomplish a similar function (make sure to check compatibility). Lantronix works good when you have a few devices but when scaling I've found other more enterprise solutions to be cheaper on the secondary market.
 

Stonent

New Member
Dec 16, 2016
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TX
Yes. I'm trying to do this on the cheap. The spiders still run $350-ish a piece used that I've seen.