How To Quiet Down a Dell PowerEdge R620 & R720
The Dell PowerEdge R620 which I run in my server rack is surprisingly loud. The lowest / quietest fan speed I can set through iDrac is not quiet at all. The “Low Offset” fan profile still continues to run the fans at 60% of their speeds, I decided to attempt to set raw IPMI settings using the ipmitool. Since I’m running ESXi 7 on this server, I installed a version of ipmitool directly into VMware’s ESXi for in-band ipmi control.
This procedure will set the the fans of an R620 and R720 to 20% using manual control. I also found that this setting needs to be re-applied after a server reboot.
Instructions:
- Download the ESXi Ipmitool here: ipmitool-esxi-vib-1.8.11-2
- SSH into ESXi. You may need to start the SSH service first
- Set the software acceptance level to “Community”
esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported - Transfer the ipmitool VIB over to ESXi using SCP and place into /tmp folder
scp ipmitool-esxi-vib-1.8.11-2.zip root@your-esxi-server:/tmp/ - Install the ipmitool VIB
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/ipmitool-1.8.11-2.x86_64.vib - Verify the ipmitool VIB is installed and working by simply printing the LAN configuration.
/opt/ipmitool/ipmitool lan print - Set your IPMI into Manual Mode
/opt/ipmitool/ipmitool raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00 - Set your fans to 20%
/opt/ipmitool/ipmitool raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14
