Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415 Management Overview
We are going to focus our management discussion on iDRAC and some of the tools to manage an individual server. The company has offerings to manage fleets of servers, but that can be several additional reviews. Instead, when you try to access the server’s remote management interface, you will see a standard interface that is equivalent to the company’s Intel Xeon experience.
The PowerEdge R7415 utilizes iDRAC 9. One of the first things we noticed was the snappy responsiveness of the web UI. With this generation, Dell EMC upgraded the CPU that runs iDRAC. This means that the PowerEdge server is able to collect more data, send more data to fleet management controllers, and more notably, render pages faster.
We use a lot of these web management tools since our lab has racks of gear from dozens of vendors. Some are fast with far fewer features such as Supermicro’s IPMI. Some have a lot of features but are slow. For example, if you have used a Lenovo Xeon E5 generation system’s IMM, you have had time to contemplate whether a sundial is an appropriate tool for timing the page loads. With iDRAC 9, the system is responsive.
We even validated that that responsiveness continued on the road. With the server in the data center in the Silicon Valley California, we remotely operated the UI over an IPsec VPN from Singapore and Taipei and the page loads were still relatively on par with what we would expect given the geographic latency. If you have remote administration teams that sit on another continent, iDRAC is a pleasant experience while some other, slower solutions, are rough on the admin.
The dashboard provides a simple UI to see status at a glance and directly launch IPMI management. One can also place the system into lockdown mode from the More Actions menu in the event you need to increase security.
The iKVM feature is a must-have feature for any server today as it has one of the best ROI’s when it comes to troubleshooting. iDRAC 9 features several iKVM console modes including Java, ActiveX, and HTML5.
Modern server management solutions such as iDRAC are essentially embedded IoT systems dedicated to managing bigger systems. As such, iDRAC has a number of configuration settings for the service module so you can set up proper networking as an example.
In terms of monitoring, iDRAC has a basic dashboard that gives stats. This can often be used as a sanity check.
Although the individual metrics are interesting, the larger picture implication is that this monitoring can feed into larger monitoring and management solutions. Dell EMC has their own tools and is also active in the industry so if you use a 3rd party tool, there is a high probability iDRAC is supported.
Part of that data collection involves simple tasks such as inventorying systems. It is common to have servers that were purchased at different times to have slightly different configurations. iDRAC can offer this data to management tools.
A standout feature we wanted to show was a BIOS configuration page. One can make BIOS changes via a web UI. That is astounding. If you (or your IT admin) has ever had to make a BIOS change using a legacy method, this is a huge benefit. Using iKVM was a major upgrade to the process but it was still onerous. An admin would remotely reboot a system and furiously attack the DEL, F2, or other keystrokes to ensure they made it into BIOS. From there, some of the less advanced 2018 BIOS setups still look like their UI designers idolized early 1990’s DOS programs. Some of the more advanced BIOS setups look more like Windows 2000 era programs. By having BIOS configurable using the iDRAC, one can use a modern UI and avoid that unpleasant process.
From the screenshots provided, you can see there is a lot more to iDRAC 9. If you want to learn more, go try it.
Our key takeaway here is that if you are accustomed to managing Dell EMC PowerEdge servers based on Intel Xeon, the PowerEdge AMD EPYC versions are going to feel the same. That is a great job by the Dell EMC team to keep the functionality virtually the same across platforms.
Next, we are going to look at the Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415 performance before we get to the storage part to show why this is the top single socket AMD EPYC solution available today.
Patrick,
Does the unit support SAS3/NVMe is any drive slot/bay, or is the chassis preconfigured?
You can configure for all SAS/ SATA, all NVMe, or a mix. Check the configurator for the up to date options.
@BinkyTO
It depends on how you have the chassis configured. It sounds like they have the 24 drive with max 8 NVMe disk configuration. With that the NVMe drives need to be in the last 8 slots.
How come nobody else mentioned that hot swap feature in their reviews. Great review as always STH. This will help convince others at work that we can start trying EPYC.
The system tested has a 12 + 12 backplane. 12 drives are SAS/SATA and 12 are universal supporting either direct connect NVMe or SAS/SATA. Thanks Patrick and Serve the Home for this very thorough review… Dell EMC PowerEdge product management team
These reviews are gems on the Internet. They’re so comprehensive. Better than many of the paid reports we buy.
I take it the single 8GB DIMM and epyc 7251 config that’s on sale for $2.1k right now isn’t what you’d get.
You’ve raved about the 7551p but I’d say the 7401p is the best perf/$
Great review! Any chance of a cooling analysis (with thermal imaging)?
Impressive review
Koen – we do thermal imaging on some motherboard reviews. On the systems side, we have largely stopped thermal imaging since getting inside the system while it is racked in a data center is difficult. Also, removing the top to do imaging impacts airflow through the chassis which changes cooling.
The PowerEdge team generally has a good handle on how to cool servers and we did not see anything in our testing, including 100GbE NIC cooling, to suggest thermals were anything other than acceptable.
Great review.
Thanks for the reply Patrick. Understand the practical difficulties and appreciate you sharing your thoughts on the cooling. Fill it up with hot swap nvme 2.5″ + add-in cards and you got a serious amount of heat being generated!
Great Review! Many thanks, Patrick!