Tutorial on iDRAC RACADM Command Line

This video will demonstrate on iDRAC RACADM Command Line.

Hi, welcome back.

In this training video, we’ll be covering the RACADM command line tool. First, let’s cover the three forms of RACADM. The first type of RACADM is firmware. In order to connect, you’ll need an SSH session. This is sometimes included with the operating system.

Other times, you’ll need to install a third-party tool. The second type is local RACADM. This is ran from the host OS command line. It does not require any further authentication.

You must have iDRAC tools installed or open managed server administrator which comes prepackaged with the iDRAC tools. And the last type is remote RACADM.

Instead of managing the local iDRAC we can manage a remote iDRAC. This will require login credentials, however. L Like local, you’ll need to install iDRAC tools or OMSA to perform these operations. For more information, you can check the RACADM CLI Guide, which is on the support site.

The RACADM Help Command, which is accessed directly from the tool itself, as well as the Attribute guide, which includes most of the FQDDs that are supported on the iDRAC. This is also located on the website. Here, I will quickly show how to get these guides. Go to dell.com/support.

Once here, enter “iDRAC9”, and then the firmware series you are looking for. Once on the main page, you can review the “Documentation” section for the needed guides. You can also find the other versions of iDRAC by following a similar approach. Let’s first take a look at the local RACADM.

On the system hosting the iDRAC, open up the “command line”. Next, type “racadm” and press “Enter”. Here, you can see the syntax of the local and remote commands. Next, try “racadm getsysinfo”. This will show us some detailed info about the local iDRAC such as “IP”, “service tag”, and “DNS name”.

Now we’ll try that same command, but from another system. We will use the remote feature of RACADM to connect to that same iDRAC, only this time, over the network.

You can see here, that we get the same info this way as we would locally. Next, let’s look at the firmware version we access with an SSH session.

I will be using a common tool known as “PuTTy” to establish the session. Any SSH tool should work. Once the connection is established, you will need to log in to the iDRAC. Notice how on the newer versions of iDRAC, we are already inside the “racadm” prompt.

To run the previous command, all we need to type is “getsysinfo”. You will see the same info here from SSH as you would in the other iDRAC tools. One useful command is “serveraction”. Let’s use the “help” command to see the options available.

Let's try a graceful shutdown of the remote host. Keep in mind, this will only work if the host is currently able to do a graceful shutdown. If unable to, then nothing will happen and a forced shutdown does not occur. You would need to run the command “powerdown” or “powercycle” to force the reboot.

You can check the status with the command “serveraction powerstatus”. After the server eventually powers off, you can bring it back up with the command “serveraction powerup”. You can again, confirm that it comes online with the “powerstatus” sub-command. Should you have an issue with the iDRAC, you can also run the command “racreset”. This will reboot the iDRAC, but won’t delete any of the config.

Please be aware that it can take a few minutes before it will let you reconnect, as it will need time to reboot. Finally, I will quickly show you how we can pull info using the fully qualified device descriptors, or FQDD.

In this example, I am checking to see if the processor virtualization has been turned on in the BIOS or not. Here, we can see that it is, in fact, enabled. This will now conclude our basic overview of RACADM.

Thank you for viewing.