Dell PowerEdge R330 - Lifecycle and iDRAC

For the first time in years and years; maybe ever to this extent, I delved into the guts of a hardware platform; the Dell PowerEdge platform.

We order a lot of these where I work; Dell R220 (originally), Dell R230, Dell R330 and Dell R430.

Dell R430 - Carrier Grade (redundant and scalable)
Dell R330 - Enterprise Grade (has redundancy; drives, RAID card, power supplies)
Dell R230 - Commercial / Consumer Grade (weaker computing power, no redundancy)

These go up, actually, to a R7xxx series (I know someone who bought one of those - an R710), but we don't go that high where I work.

I have played with these boxes quite a bit; adding memory, auxiliary network cards, and in one case had to set a jumper to clear NVRAM on the box.  One a few boxes in the earlier days, I would configure RAID on them, and partition the drives in the CentOS installer (a Kickstart process takes away that fun for us nowadays).

One thing I have done, is install iDRAC cards into boxes that were not initially ordered with iDRAC cards.  I learned that if you buy the wrong ones, they might be compatible with the box, but they may not have the screw holes to mount them on the motherboard (I had to return those).

Lately, I have been playing with the iDRAC and Lifecycle Controller functions on the Dell R330.  I've learned that there are numerous version of iDRAC (newer boxes happen to be running iDRAC 8 while the ones from the last couple years are on 6 and 7). Dell has documentation on these versions, which use a primitive command line (CLI) syntax that has not changed much since I originally used RACADM in the 90s.

I also played with the OS-Passthrough feature.  You can direct cable with a CAT5/6 the iDRAC and a spare port on the box, and put static IPs on both of those ports and create a closed-loop out-of-band management LAN without actually cabling the box into an external network infrastructure of any kind. This allows you to VPN or tunnel into a box, and then access the local management network to get into iDRAC. You do have to cable it though - there's no way to create a virtual LAN (that I saw). You can add another IP for Lifecycle Controller if you set that statically, and have 3 IPs; one for Lifecycle Controller, one for iDRAC, and then the IP that the Operating System statically assigns when the OS comes up.

iDRAC has a web front-end that can be configured and enabled. Licensing guides on what can be done in the GUI, whereas when you use the CLI the licensing does not seem to be very informative to the user on what restrictions might be in play.

I never did get the Life Cycle Controller web interface to work, if that even exists (maybe it has a client or software that runs remotely and accesses that - looking into). So this software as it stands, appears to only work if you're on the physical console of the box and access it via the F10 key at bootup.

Trying to learn some more but at this point, this is what I have learned.