24. 06. 2022 Giuseppe Di Garbo NetEye

R.I.P. IPMI – Long Live Redfish

IPMI (the Intelligent Platform Management Interface) has been the de facto standard for managing and monitoring computer hardware for many years, but as Intel explicitly stated here no further updates to the IPMI specification are planned or should be expected.

“No further updates to the IPMI specification are planned or should be expected. The IPMI promoters encourage equipment vendors and IT managers to consider a more modern systems management interface which can provide better security, scalability, and features for existing datacenters and be supported on the requisite platforms and devices. DMTF’s Redfish standard (from redfish.dmtf.org) is an example of one such interface”

What is Redfish?

Redfish is a standard specification, API and schema developed by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) group designed for management of servers, storage, networks, and converged infrastructure (CI) components, and is supported by several companies including Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, VMware and others.

Redfish monitors the chassis information, components such as fans, chassis, power supplies, sensors and their state, or metrics like voltage or temperature. It is used to perform remote recovery procedures, provide system and event logs, respond to warnings and critical events, and manage user accounts.

Below are the feature sets of Redfish v1.0 as reported in the introduction document of DMTF:

For more information on Redfish see:

How to monitor devices using the Redfish protocol and NetEye

Using Redfish it’s therefore possible to obtain a lot of health system status. To monitor systems that support the Redfish protocol it’s first necessary to verify that the vendor and model supports this protocol.

For example, Dell supports Redfish protocol with iDRAC version 8/7 v2.20.40.40, and to enable it you can follow this guide. Also an iDRAC dedicated user must be create to enable the authentication.

Therefore if you have the IP address, username and password of the device, you can use check_redfish.py, a monitoring plugin to check components and the health status of systems which support Redfish.

Below is an example of use:

# python /neteye/shared/monitoring/plugins/check_redfish/check_redfish.py -H my_address -u username -p password --all

[OK]: BMC: iDRAC 9 (Firmware: 5.00.10.20) and all nics are in 'OK' state.
[OK]: All fans (6) are in good condition and fan redundancy status is: Enabled
[OK]: Found 42 firmware entries. Use '--detailed' option to display them.
[OK]: Manager Event Log contains 1583 OK entries. Most recent notable: [OK]: 2022-06-24T17:12:32-05:00: Successfully logged in using XXXXXXXXXXX, from 10.XX.YY.ZZ and REDFISH.
[OK]: All memory modules (Total 96GB) are in good condition
[OK]: All network adapter (1) and ports (2) are in good condition
[OK]: All power supplies (2) are in good condition and Power redundancy 1 status is: Enabled and 42 Voltages are OK
[OK]: All processors (2) are in good condition
[OK]: All storage controllers (3), volumes (13) and disk drives (14) are in good condition
[OK]: INFO: Dell Inc. PowerEdge R740xd (CPU: 2, MEM: 96GB) - BIOS: 2.12.2 - Serial: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - ServiceTag: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX - Power: On - Name: myhostname - 49 health sensors are in 'OK' state
[OK]: All temp sensors (4) are in good condition|'ps_1'=267 'ps_2'=0 'voltage_CPU1_VCORE_VR'=1.78 'voltage_CPU2_VCORE_VR'=1.78 'voltage_CPU1_MEM012_VR'=1.21 'voltage_CPU1_MEM345_VR'=1.21 'voltage_CPU2_MEM012_VR'=1.21 'voltage_CPU2_MEM345_VR'=1.21 'voltage_PS1_Voltage_1'=228.0 'voltage_PS2_Voltage_2'=228.0 'temp_CPU1_Temp'=44.0;;89 'temp_CPU2_Temp'=44.0;;89 'temp_System_Board_Inlet_Temp'=21.0;38;42 'temp_System_Board_Exhaust_Temp'=32.0;75;80 'Fan_System_Board_Fan1'=7320;; 'Fan_System_Board_Fan2'=7440;; 'Fan_System_Board_Fan3'=7320;; 'Fan_System_Board_Fan4'=7200;; 'Fan_System_Board_Fan5'=7320;; 'Fan_System_Board_Fan6'=7320;;

Soon this monitoring check will also be supported by our NetEye Extension Packs, allowing immediate installation and setup of the plugin.

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Giuseppe Di Garbo

Giuseppe Di Garbo

Consultant at Würth Phoenix
Hi everybody. I’m Giuseppe and I was born in Milan in 1979. Since the early years of university, I was attracted by the Open Source world and operating system GNU\Linux. After graduation I had the opportunity to participate in a project of a startup for the realization of an Internet Service Provider. Before joining Würth Phoenix as SI consultant, I gained great experience as an IT consultant on projects related to business continuity and implementation of open source software compliant to ITIL processes of incident, change and service catalog management. My free time is completely dedicated to my wife and, as soon as possible, run away from Milan and his caotic time and trekking discover our beautiful mountain near Lecco for relax and lookup the (clean) sky.

Author

Giuseppe Di Garbo

Hi everybody. I’m Giuseppe and I was born in Milan in 1979. Since the early years of university, I was attracted by the Open Source world and operating system GNU\Linux. After graduation I had the opportunity to participate in a project of a startup for the realization of an Internet Service Provider. Before joining Würth Phoenix as SI consultant, I gained great experience as an IT consultant on projects related to business continuity and implementation of open source software compliant to ITIL processes of incident, change and service catalog management. My free time is completely dedicated to my wife and, as soon as possible, run away from Milan and his caotic time and trekking discover our beautiful mountain near Lecco for relax and lookup the (clean) sky.

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