Dell BMC (Baseband Management Controller) on shared LAN, performance hit? static IP?

Question

I am thinking of using Dell's BMC on some servers that we house at a datacenter to ease remote monitoring/administration in the event of failures.

I have some questions:

1. It appears that I can configure BMC to use the same LAN that I plan to use for the O/S. Any drawback to this? Any performance degradation of O/S LAN throughput since I am sharing it now with BMC? (We only pay for one LAN connection per server).

2. Can the BMC be configured so it uses a static IP address? Our datacenter provides 3 IPs per system, and we use 2 per system, and we have a 3rd free one that I think I use for this purpose, but our datacenter requires use to explicitly set static IP in client.

3. Once the BMC is enabled, it will be exposed as the third ip address. How do I prevent a malicious user from gaining control of my system through the exposed BMC interface on that ip address? Can I setup a password?

Answer 1

1. No

2. Yes

3. Yes

Additionally, BMC != iDRAC