DM-
SV01 Server ● BMC User Manual ● Rev. 2.1
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1 Introduction
The BMC (Baseboard Management Controller) is a specialized microprocessor present in the DM-SV01
motherboard and responsible for a set of monitoring and management functions of the host system.
The BMC concept is widely employed in the datacenter industry and this solution is present in a wide
range of products, such as servers, storage systems, switches, etc. The main advantage of having a
BMC in the product is that it allows the system management staff to remotely monitor and control
several functions of the system, without the need of being physically present in the datacenter facilities.
Some of the main functions provided by the BMC are the following:
● Inventory data management for several system components (such as CPUs, memories, NICs,
etc).
● Monitoring the system temperatures and controlling the cooling system (FANs) in order to
provide a secure and efficient thermal behavior by means of a dedicated PID controller.
● Monitoring the server temperatures and power consumption for generating alarms whenever a
critical threshold is exceeded.
● Control system power operations, such as CPUs reset and power on/off.
● Remote BIOS/UEFI and BMC FW update.
● KVM for remotely accessing the video output of the host processors, as well as to virtually
interact with the server using the mouse and keyboard from your remote workstation.
● Virtual media, which allows the user to load an ISO file for OS installation or maintenance
purposes.
● Serial over LAN (SoL), which allows the user to access the output console of the host system
by means of the BMC web GUI.
● LDAP, which allows the authentication of users by means of an external LDAP server.
The BMC operation is independent of the host CPUs. This means that the BMC can be reset or have
its FW upgraded without affecting the host CPUs processing functions. Also the CPUs can be reset and
turned on/off without affecting the BMC management and monitoring functionalities.
In the DM-SV01, the BMC can be accessed and controlled by a dedicated Ethernet port present in the
front panel of the system (out of band management) or by means of the Ethernet port from the
mezzanine NIC card, sharing the traffic with the host CPUs (in band management). Details of the
network connections for the BMC can be found in the section “2.4.1 Network settings”.
When remotely accessing the BMC, the server administrator has almost full control over the server
without the need of being physically present in the datacenter premises. As an example, the user may
load an ISO file for OS installation by means of the virtual media, turn the host processors on through
the BMC and then use the KVM to interact with the BIOS/UEFI and the OS installer.
All these functions can be accessed remotely and are available in the BMC web management Graphical
User Interface (GUI). Once the user has network connectivity to the BMC, the BMC web GUI can be
accessed by means of the network browser from the remote workstation. Detailed information regarding
the web GUI and all the functions
available can be found in the section “2 BMC Web GUI”.
1.1 DM-SV01 BMC FW
The BMC FW for the DM-SV01 has been developed using the OpenBMC distribution as a starting point
to implement the features and functionalities required to properly manage the server. OpenBMC is an
open source FW distribution available at github (
https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc
), which uses
some customizable components to allow developers to adopt it as a basis for developing its own BMC
management solution.
