Control or reduce fan speed of Dell R820

Question

I recently bought Dell R820 from Amazon. It has 192gb of RAM, 4x Xeon CPUs but Dell Idrac is not working anymore after update firmware from OS. Fan's go full blast and it's very noisy. I tried all fixes from dell's web site suggestions. But no avail. Is there a way to reduce fan speed without iDrac or lifecycle?

Solution

The fan speed settings exposed in the iDRAC interface may not be enough to quiet the fans to an acceptable level.

Install Dell OpenManage Server Administrator on the server and then run the ipmitool utility to adjust the fan speeds.

The ipmitool should be located in the following directory after you install DOMSA:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\SysMgt\bmc

Launch a command prompt on the server and navigate to the directory above. Then run the following commands, substituting the ip address (-H), username (-U), and password (-P) of your iDRAC:

To enable remote fan control: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

To set the fan to 20%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14

To set the fan to 25%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x19

To set the fan to 30%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1e

To set the fan to 35%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x23

To set the fan to 40%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x28

To set the fan to 45%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x2D

To set the fan to 50%: ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.1.240 -U root -P calvin raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x32

Comments

[Michael Hampton]

The first thing to do is to fix iDRAC.