I have 9 Dell 1850 servers that we are going to be relocating from our office to our remote data center.
In any new servers that I purchase I've been including the DRAC card in them for remote management.
I would like to know if anyone has been sucsessful in adding a DRAC card to a server themselves. Ebay has a good selection of cards but I wanted to see if anyone has any experince with this and if there is anything specific I should be aware of.
Thanks.
I have installed countless dracs at my job. I have installed them in Dell Poweredge 1950's, but I'm sure they will work in the 1850's. They are very easy to physically install in the system.
They are easy to configure, you press Control E during bootup when prompted to access the drac setup. There you set IP information, and initial login account. If you use dhcp, you'll see the drac's ip address upon reboot.
I highly recommend updating the firmware on any drac as a first step, it seems to help save headaches in the future. You do that via the web interface.
DRAC's will work in Windows and Linux, with IE you need to tweek active x settings so the plugins will install properly.
I added one years ago (2003/2004) and it worked fine. Some network config to give it its own IP, but seemed to be simple.
I'd double check the RAC card v your firmware with DELL support, though.
You can also get those cards pretty cheap on ebay. I've added them to probably a dozen servers and they all work fine.
for the 1850 you need the DRAC4, since the current DRAC5 is for the 9g servers
