System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 (SCVMM) has the ability to communicate with the Dell DRAC.  This enables you to do things such as power on, reset, or power off a host server using the DRAC from the SCVMM console.

I’ve successfully configured SCVMM to communicate with the DRAC 5 and iDRAC 6.  On the DRAC 5 I had to enable IPMI, which is the communication protocol used by SCVMM to communicate with the DRAC.  On the DRAC 5 IPMI is enabled by clicking on Remote Access, followed by the Configuration tab and then Network.  At the bottom of the screen is the option to enable IPMI over LAN.  Click Apply Changes to save your changes.  Check that the user account you wish to use has the IPMI LAN privilege by clicking on the Users tab, next to Network.

On the iDRAC 6, IPMI is enabled by clicking on iDRAC Settings, the Network/Security tab, then Network.  At the bottom of the screen is the option to enable IPMI over LAN.  Click Apply Changes to save your changes.  Check that the user account you wish to use has the IPMI LAN privilege by clicking on the Users tab, next to Network.

To configure SCVMM to use the DRAC, open the SCVMM console and navigate to Fabric.  Right-click on the host and choose properties.  Notice that in the screenshot below the Reset and Power Off options are unavailable as the DRAC hasn’t been configured to work with SCVMM.

Click on Hardware and scroll to the Advanced section at the bottom of the properties page.  Tick the box “This physical machine is configured for OOB management with the following settings”.  Enter the IP address of the DRAC into the BMC address box.  Click Browse next to Run As account.  Click Create Run As Account and register the DRAC account you wish to use.  Untick the Validate domain credentials box if you’re using a DRAC user account.  Once you’ve entered the Run As account click OK.

If you click on the host properties, you will now see that the Reset and Power Off options are available for this host.