Monitors system power requirements and supports the optional Dynamic Power Supply Engagement (DPSE) mode. The DPSE mode improves power efficiency by allowing the CMC to dynamically place power supplies in standby mode, depending on the load and redundancy requirements.

Reports real-time power consumption, which includes logging high and low points with a time stamp.

Supports setting an optional enclosure Maximum Power Limit, which either alerts or takes actions, such as throttling server modules and/or preventing the power up of new blades to keep the enclosure under the defined maximum power limit.

Monitors and automatically controls cooling fans based on actual ambient and internal temperature measurements.

Provides comprehensive enclosure inventory and status/error reporting.

CMC fail-safe mode. For more information, see CMC Fail-Safe Mode.

The CMC provides a mechanism for centralized configuration of the following:

The enclosure’s network and security settings

Power redundancy and power ceiling settings

I/O switches and iDRAC network settings

First boot device on the server blades

Checks I/O fabric consistency between the I/O modules and blades and disables components if necessary to protect the system hardware

User access security

NOTE: It is recommended that you isolate chassis management from the data network. Dell cannot support or guarantee uptime of a chassis that is improperly integrated into your environment. Due to the potential of traffic on the data network, the management interfaces on the internal management network can be saturated by traffic intended for servers. This results in CMC and iDRAC communication delays. These delays may cause unpredictable chassis behavior, such as CMC displaying iDRAC as offline even when it is up and running, which in turn causes other unwanted behavior. If physically isolating the management network is impractical, the other option is to separate CMC and iDRAC traffic to a separate VLAN. The CMC and individual iDRAC network interfaces can be configured to use a VLAN with the racadm setniccfg command. For more information, see the Dell Chassis Management Controller Administrator Reference Guide at support.dell.com/manuals.

CMC Fail-Safe Mode

Similar to the failover protection offered by the redundant CMC, the M1000e enclosure enables the fail-safe mode to protect the blades and I/O modules from failures. The fail-safe mode is enabled when no CMC is in control of the chassis. During the CMC failover period or during a single CMC management loss:

you cannot turn on newly installed blades

existing blades cannot be accessed remotely

chassis cooling fans run at 100% for thermal protection of the components

blade performance reduces to limit power consumption until management of the CMC is restored

The following are some of the conditions that can result in CMC management loss:

Condition

Description

CMC removal

Chassis management resumes after replacing CMC, or after failover to standby CMC.

CMC network cable

Chassis management resumes after the chassis fails over to the standby CMC. Network

removal or network

failover is only enabled in redundant CMC mode.

connection loss

 

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Dell BMX01 owner manual CMC Fail-Safe Mode, Condition Description CMC removal, CMC network cable