DELL ipmish.exe and Remote BMC commands

This was a post by the office Robert. 🙂

Dell offers remote console connectivity using the SOL function of the BMC. This is a good tool but there is another tool that allows you to connect to the BMC and gather a lot of information as well as give you control over things like power resets, power off and so forth.

You need to have the Dell BMC tools loaded on a machine (like your workstation), the tools can be installed from the DVD that accompanies every Dell server. The tool is IPMISH.exe which will be located in the C: Program FilesDellSysMgtbmc directory. It is a command line tool so you will need to open a command window and navigate to the directory. I won’t go into a whole bunch of detail about all the command line switches as that is covered in the documentation that accompanies the install programs. Rather, I will highlight the basics.

I find it easiest to use the tool in “interactive mode” as you can do many things in that mode. At the command prompt enter ipmish.exe -interactive, you should see the following:

Typing help will list all available commands:

You need to connect to the BMC controller on a server at this point, I’ll connect to our test server:

Now I can use some of the other commands to display stats or play with power settings:

This tool combined with the BMC Remote Console functions give you remote management abilities for Dell servers without DRAC abilities. And both tolls will operate across VPN links (all of the example screens were produced while I was on VPN back to the office).