In the latest NOC-PS version you can select “Redfish” as “IPMI protocol” when adding new servers.
Redfish is a new REST API that is supported by most newer servers, as alternative to the older IPMI RMCP+ protocol.
We use it for the same purposes such as telling the server to power on or off, and telling it to perform a PXE boot.
Advantages
- If you don’t know the MAC address of the server you are adding to NOC-PS, you can now leave the “MAC field” blank. If “redfish” is selected as IPMI type we will use that to look it up.
- It is enabled on newer Dell and HP servers by default (as opposed to IPMI-over-LAN which needs to be enabled separately in the DRAC/iLO settigns)
- It is more secure. The RMCP+ protocol -by its mutual authentication design- allows anyone to fetch a hash of your IPMI password! Redfish does not.
- We can obtain some basic extra hardware information such as CPU, memory and the MAC-addresses of your NICs using Redfish. Information is made available in the server “properties”, at the same place information obtained through running our “collect hardware information” profile is stored.
Disadvantages
- The Redfish implementations of some vendors currently respond rather slow to our commands.
- For Supermicro servers you need a license to activate Redfish. 🙁 Other vendors do not charge.