We have bought several new Dell PowerEdge R410 with a iDRAC6 Enterprise card, which is supposed to give us full remote access control over the machine, including virtual console and virtual media.
Overall, it works as expected. I can use the virtual console and also the virtual media to control the machine remotely. However, when I reboot the machine the DRAC IP becomes unavailable for over 30 seconds (i.e. not responding to any network activity such as ping or HTTP requests). By the time it finally becomes available again, the server is often past the boot sequence which means I cannot enter the BIOS, or boot from virtual media.
I managed to solve this by using the cold-power-switch option after which it takes more time to the machine to fully reboot and after a few tries if I act very fast I manage to catch it before the boot sequence is over. But it doesn't look right, from my understanding the DRAC mechanism is separate and should not be affected by the server reboot. Why does it reset the connection? Is there any way to prevent this?
Best Answer
i had similar problem with 1 [ out of ~30 ] DRAC5s. it occurred only when i was using shared nic, as soon as i reconfigured to use dedicated Ethernet port it worked fine also during reboots.
i had exactly same symptoms - drac was not reachable over the lan [ no pings, no web interface ] for 10-20 sec after reboot.