How I remotely access and manage my servers even when they are powered off!

hey what's going on everybody its Rob Williston Phil here and in this video I want to talk about how I how exactly I access my servers remotely to a Java console which a few of you noticed I've done in my recent videos so to start off here you'll see my stack of servers and I've got a few with Dell CS 24 SCS along with this Dell 2950 generation 2 on the bottom here and the Dell C 2100 on the very very bottom and these are the main servers I'm going to be talking about in this video here is these two but each one of the servers is going to have dedicated hardware in it along with a network port that will be wired into the network that gives us this capability you can't really get this and any other kind of setups there are some super micro motherboards out there that I think have a like a BMC set up on them that you can get but for the most part you're really only going to see this on server grade hardware alright so coming around to the backside of the servers here we can see how this is all wired up now you'll notice that I have these black cat 6 cables on the right here and those are going to be all my BMC indirect traffic and you'll typically want to VLAN this traffic off from your regular traffic and tighten things up a little bit but each one of the servers is going to have a dedicated rj45 port that goes into its BMC or Drac and you'll see each one of those is wired up here directly and each one of these cards will also get its own IP address on the network as well and we'll use that to connect to the Drac through its HTTP management so each one of these servers is going to have dedicated hardware that gives us this capability and sometimes it's built directly into the motherboard sometimes they'll have a slot and it's an optional card that you can add in like is on the 2950 gen 2 but for the most part they're all going to have one port that's a 10100 that will be used for the Drac or BMC and then you'll have your standard 2 gigabit ports that are used for your normal network connectivity in traffic if it's just a cheap generic controller it'll often be referred to as a BMC or base board management controller but Dell does call their higher end ones dracs or Dell remote access controllers and HP calls theirs ILO's but they all basically provide the same function elodie they run some sort of HTTP server that gives you access to a remote java console power management settings some of them some of them will even let you mount an ISO remotely so you can load an operating system and other features like that all right so now over on my workstation we're going to browse through the IP addresses of the the first one is going to be a Drac on the 29 50 and the second one is going to be a BMC on SE 2100 but let's go ahead and start with the 20 the 29 50 first so it's pretty typical when you go to access these that you'll get a certificate warning from the certificate being self signed or something like that but just go ahead and click advanced and add the exception and it should load the portal up successfully where we can go ahead and log in now if you don't know the credentials you can opt-in a reset that credentials through the configuration that you'll see in the boot sequence or for a BMC you often do this in the BIOS but you'll see that it loads us into the portal successfully and it give us all kinda information about the server itself you can also see like health of the hardware and stuff and then we knows the power management settings on the top here and these are the settings here that allow you to to the server on or off even if it's off as long as the servers plugged in and has power you can turn it on and over on the console tab here this is what's going to give us that job a KVM that you see me using in videos but it's going to give us full on keyboard video and mouse access directly as if we were like sitting in front of a server and physically hooked up to it and now you just click connect and then open up with the Java Web Start launcher here and click continue through the various security warnings now these can be very picky about what version of Java you're using to open them with it's just worth noting that it can be a complete pain in the butt but you will sometimes have to use older versions of Java but you see here that it successfully loads the console and we see no signal because it's not turned on so let's go ahead and turn the server on now and we should see a boot up just like we are sitting in front of the server here so you can see everything from start to finish as soon as we power the server on all right so we see the server is actually booting up right now so if you have a BMC this is typically where you'll want to hit f2 to enter the setup and that you'll configure it through the BIOS and I don't have like a remote administration portion in there but you can go ahead and set the IP address oh as well as setting the username and password or well typically just the password but that's it so this one has a dell drac tied to it and it actually comes up during the boot process so I'm actually gonna skip ahead a little bit because it takes a second to get there after the rate controller boots but I'm going to skip ahead to that and then I'll show you how we configure the thermode access controller on the Dell 2950 all right so here we go we see this as press ctrl e to access the remote access setup and it also shows us the current IP address that's used for it right now but here we go this is the configuration settings and you can go ahead and set this static IP for the Drac itself and that's the one news on the web browser to connect to as well as there's the various settings for mounting remote media you can change the user or set reset the password and all that kind of stuff but basically everything you would need to configure the Drac will be found within here so just by hitting that ctrl e when it boots gets us directly into the settings and now once we've set that up we can then hit the hit it via the web browser and pull up our console and all of that fun stuff so the server is not going to do anything because I don't have anything installed on it right now so it's just going to sit there but let's go ahead and check out that media option so you'll see if when we click on the media tab on the top here we have options for virtual media virtual flash and various configuration settings but it's definitely something cool to see that you can actually do this and remotely mount media to install like your operating systems and whatnot so let's go ahead and check out the 2100 and this one's going to actually be a BMC versus the other one was a Drac controller but you'll see that they look very similar they have a lot of it's very familiar console and there's a lot of similar features but it gives us the various information page and then we have our console button up here we can go ahead and launch our KVM and it launches exactly the same way and we'll end up with the same security warnings and all that stuff but it popped up on my other screen here but we see and this is a ESXi server but it actually shows us exactly that you would see on the screen as if we are sitting in front of it and we got our remote control - with mouse and keyboard and all that stuff so I think that's pretty much going to wrap this one up I hope this gives you a basic idea of the kind of hardware you would need in the basic setup and configuration of how it's all wired and put together - to kind of get involved with something like this really hope you guys enjoyed this one and thanks for watching if you did like it and you haven't subscribed make sure you subscribe and thanks again for watching

Channel: Rob Willis

Views: 58,806

Keywords: Remote Access, DRAC, BMC, iLO, Java Console, IPMI, Baseboard Management Controller, Dell

Id: eCUvXA48Q-I

Length: 7min 13sec (433 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2016