Dell seems to be unable to create a working iDRAC firmware for iDRAC 7. Every time there is an update, new issues occur. See this post about IPMI errors for a recap of some of my adventures down in firmware la la land. Recent troubles have prompted me to create this list of known “good” and bad versions. I can in no way promise that they wont cause issues in your systems, I just know that ours are fairly stable with the good versions, and unstable with the bad ones. And note, when I say stable, I refer to the state of the server, not the state of the iDRAC or CMC system. As an example; iDRAC 1.57.57 is delivered with a list of no less than 82 known issues. I lost my patience at no. 20, but most of them seems to be related to problems with the iDRAC system itself and functions that does not work as expected on different web-browsers. You can download it from Dell here if you have a hankering for some light reading.
Known “good” iDRAC firmware:
- 1.40.40
- 1.46.45
- 1.56.55
- 1.66.65
1.46.45 and 1.66.65 in particular has been very stable.
Known bad iDRAC firmware:
- All versions from 1.46.46 to 1.56.54
- 2.10.10 (incompatibility with some CMC versions)
- 2.21.21.21 (IPMI 1004 error)
1.51.51 (and maybe some adjacent builds) has a particularly nasty memory leak that can wreak havoc on your system, randomly turning parts of the server like HBA or network cards on and off.
iDRAC firmware under investigation:
1.57.57
So far, I have found that this version triggers around 4 IPMIDRV event id 1004 warning messages in Windows 2008R2 when you install it on a running system. Furthermore, I can confirm that it actually removes some false Link tuning errors. From the Release note list of fixes: “Link tuning error occurs when enabling ports 3 and 4 through BIOS attribute.”
I suspect this to be a bug that appeared in 1.56.56, but I am not certain as this error has been prominent in previous builds as well. Conclusion: Use 1.66.65 instead.
