Cisco C880 M5 Configuration Guide
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2.1 Technical Background
The BMC performs the following tasks:
l
The BMC organizes the interface between the system management software
and the platform management hardware.
l
It provides autonomous functions for monitoring, event logging and recovery control.
l
The BMC acts as a gateway between the system management software and IPMB.
IPMI allows platform management to be extended: Additional management
controllers can be connected via the IPMB. The IPMB is an I
2
C based serial bus,
which runs between the main modules of the system. It is used for communication
with and between the management controllers.
With the support of multiple management controllers, IPMI provides a scalable
architecture: A complex server system can use multiple controllers for monitoring
different subsystems, e.g. power supplies, hot swap RAID drive modules etc.
In addition, IPMI provides ‘low level’ I
2
C commands, which can be accessed via a
management controller connected to the IPMB on 'unintelligent' I
2
C modules that
cannot process IPMI commands.
An overview of the fundamental elements of an IPMI implementation is shown in the
following figure:
