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 0x0Now 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
The ipmitool commands are not being recognized by my iDrac. Why?
ipmitool is a command in linux to control various IPMI’s.
There is also a Windows version that can be downloaded from Dell.
I just installed ipmitool under Windows using this dell Download:
Dell-iDRACTools-Web-WINX64-11.1.0.0-5294_A00.exe
BTW, thank you for the write up! The ipmitool commands also worked on a Dell PowerEdge r930 server and a Dell Precision r7910 workstation.
You have to enable IPMI over IP, it is a check box near the bottom of the network tab under iDrac Settings.
“racadm set system.thermalsettings” is good, but it resets to default after reboot… Anyone knows why?
Perhaps there is a commit command somewhere? I just have a cronjob do it at boot with a known ssh key
I solved it this way:
[Unit]
Description=Fan speeds curve racadm set
#Requires=
#After=
[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=racadm set system.thermalsettings.FanSpeedOffset 255
ExecStart=racadm set system.thermalsettings.ThirdPartyPCIFanResponse 0
ExecStart=racadm set system.thermalsettings.ThermalProfile 2
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
What file did you change?
That is a systemd service file, the service manager on linux. save this in /etc/systemd/system/. name it something like idrac-fan.service, systemctl daemon-reload, then systemctl enable idrac-fan.service.