Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC)

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What is the Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC)?

The Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC) is an embedded system management hardware and software solution to manage:

• Multiple servers
• Networking
• Storage

It provides a secure browser-based interface that enables an IT administrator to take inventory, perform configuration and monitoring tasks, remotely power on/off blade servers and enable alerts for events on servers and components in the blade chassis. It has its own microprocessor and memory and powered by the modular chassis it is plugged into. The discovery is built-in and CMC has a dedicated internal network. The blade enclosure, which can hold multiple blade servers, provides power, cooling, various interconnects and additional systems management capabilities. Unlike a tower or rack server, a blade server cannot run by itself; it requires a compatible blade enclosure. For more information about the enclosures offered by Dell, please visit these links.

What makes it compelling to many customers is that blade servers are typically optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy while still providing ample computing power. It is worth pointing out that the term “blade” or “blades” is largely interchangeable with the term “server node” when referring to the Dell PowerEdge VRTX platform, though the blades themselves are not interchangeable between different types of enclosures. Thus a server node from Dell PowerEdge VRTX is not physically compatible with the M1000e due to slightly different physical connections.

One of CMC’s more interesting features is multi-chassis management. This capability (which was introduced in CMC version 3.1) can monitor up to 9 fully loaded M1000e and VRTX chassis or 20 FX2 chassis with no additional cabling via a single web interface.

The CMC interface integrates with each blade or server node’s iDRAC module, so administrators can perform server-specific iDRAC functions such as performing updates, changing settings, or opening a remote console session from the CMC interface. Click here for more information on iDRAC-related management.

Additionally, CMC allows you to back up and replicate settings on the chassis, and save or apply BIOS profiles for individual blade servers so that adding new blades or chassis to your environment is easier and more automated. With newer versions of CMC, it is even possible to assign settings to an empty slot, so that the settings will be applied when a blade is inserted at some point in the future!
You can also capture a complete Chassis Inventory across all of your chassis that will return detailed information on all of the blades, IO modules, iDRAC cards, etc in your environment.

CMC is an innovative systems management tool built on proven and familiar Dell OpenManage design, and is available with these platforms:

Platform CMC Specific Information

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