So, I have a couple of servers in my home lab. Two of them are Dell Poweredges. One R610 and one R710. Good machines for sysadmin’s test lab. They are not noisy, by server standards. Contrary to my initial expectations, the R610 is actually quieter than its big brother. Many guys out there apply logic, saying that bigger fans means quieter fans. Wrong.

I wanted to make both servers even quieter, just as quiet as a workstation. So I found a blog post with some commands that I adapted for use on my environment. The result was great. Both servers are audible, but that’s it. They are not noisy by any standards.

Here is the solution:

1. Assuming you are running Windows on the machine (there are equivalents for Linux too), first step is to install a small piece of software from Dell, called Dell Open Manage BMC utility.

2. Once installed, open command prompt and navigate to the installation folder:

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

Then run the command to enable manual fan control:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.xxx.xxx -U root -P password -y 000000000000000000000000000000 raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

Change the value to match your iDRAC IP address. root and password are the credentials for iDRAC. The long string of zeros is the default encryption key. Change it if you have a different one set up. It can be found here: iDRAC Setings \ Network Security \ Network \ IPMI settings

3. Once fan control is set to manual, reduce the fans speeds to 20 %

ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.xxx.xxx -U root -P password -y 000000000000000000000000000000 raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14

or, to even 10 % (works only with R710. The R610 finds it too low and starts spinning up)

ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.xxx.xxx -U root -P password -y 000000000000000000000000000000 raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0xA

The last group of numbers is the percentage value converted to hexadecimal.
4. To disable manual fans speed, run this:

ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.xxx.xxx -U root -P password -y 000000000000000000000000000000 raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x01

That’s it. It is a solution tested by myself on both servers. To make it somehow automatic, enclose everything in a script to be ran at startup, and you’re good to go.