Dell iDRAC Service Module on RHEL 10.1

/ Christopher Paquin

The Dell iDRAC Service Module (ISM) is a tool that can be used for better integration between the Dell iDRAC and a running OS. It can provide additional monitoring and metrics to Idrac by brigding the gap between the OS and the underlying Dell hardware.

iSM collects data from both the operating system and hardware and merges them into the iDRAC Lifecycle Log for consolidated monitoring.

Downloading

I used this link to download for RHEL.

I then scp’d the gzipped tarball to the target system

Installation on RHEL

There are not currently packages for RHEL 10, so I went with the RHEL 9 packages. You will need to install 2 rpms from the tarball. First start with the dcism-ocs rpm. 

# dnf -y install ./dcism-osc-7.0.1.0-123.rpm

Next install the dcism rpm. 

# dnf -y install ./dcism-5.0.1.0-2951.el9.x86_64.rpm

I expect that if I was running a recognized OS, such as RHEL 9, I could have used the script setup.sh to install the rpms in the proper order.

Start the Service

Use the command below to start/restart the service

# systemctl restart dcismeng.service

Checking the output of “ip a” you will see a new interface that I assume is used to communicate back and forth between the OS and the iDRAC.

12: idrac: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether ec:2a:72:01:5b:5b brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp0s20f0u14u3
    altname enxec2a72015b5b
    inet 169.254.1.2/16 brd 169.254.255.255 scope global idrac
       valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

Enabling Features

Now that the iDRAC service module is installed we can now run setup.sh should be able to enable and disable features. Note that I did not have much luck in this area, as I was running into issues with missing files which was probably due to the fact that I installed the rpms manually. Either way, you can see what is enabled by default.

Available features are shown below.

OS Information via iDRAC

Now that the service is running and able to communicate with the iDRAC, I can see the following OS level info after logging into the iDRAC

Additional Resources

Being new to the iDRAC service module I will link to some relevant documentation which details features, functionality, and configuration.

RESOURCEURL
S.M.A.R.T monitoringhttps://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-ca/idrac-service-module/ism_4.0.1_user_guide/s.m.a.r.t-monitoring?guid=guid-90e39801-c990-43ea-b4a5-4ec0027c019e&lang=en-us
Configuring iDRAC Service Module from the iDRAC web interface
https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-ca/idrac-service-module/ism_4.0.1_user_guide/configuring-idrac-service-module-from-the-idrac-web-interface?guid=guid-7ca252a8-5491-4637-90b0-2d4b747185b6&lang=en-us

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