iDrac 7 and 8: Lower fan noise on Dell Servers

I have a Dell R720xd and its default fan curve is… aggressive. Here is how i found to lower the fan speeds so its not a constant vacuum cleaner in my living room.

Enable SSH on iDrac. Connect then connect to it and run:

racadm set system.thermalsettings.FanSpeedOffset 255
racadm set system.thermalsettings.ThirdPartyPCIFanResponse 0
racadm set system.thermalsettings.ThermalProfile 2

If you want to go full manual, enable IPMI on iDrac. Then use IPMI tool to set the fan speed manually.

ipmitool -I lanplus -H SERVERS_IP_HERE -U IDRAC_USERNAME -P 'IDRAC_PASSWORD_HERE' raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x0

Now set the fan speed to what you want. Make sure you have applied new thermal paste on the CPU’s so they do not overheat. Also make sure to check thermals on nics, PCH, add-in cards, etc as they rely on the chassis fans for cooling.

#20%
ipmitool -I lanplus -H SERVERS_IP_HERE -U IDRAC_USERNAME -P 'IDRAC_PASSWORD_HERE' raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14

#25%
ipmitool -I lanplus -H SERVERS_IP_HERE -U IDRAC_USERNAME -P 'IDRAC_PASSWORD_HERE' raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x19

#30%
ipmitool -I lanplus -H SERVERS_IP_HERE -U IDRAC_USERNAME -P 'IDRAC_PASSWORD_HERE' raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1E

#50%
ipmitool -I lanplus -H SERVERS_IP_HERE -U IDRAC_USERNAME -P 'IDRAC_PASSWORD_HERE' raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x32

Find something that works better? post it so I can add it to the article.

Works with R720 R720xd R520 R620 R730 R730xd R630 R530. Had to do this for SEO