Dell PowerEdge R210 II Fan Control

The Dell PowerEdge R210 II, being a 1U rackmount server targeted to enterprise users, is really loud. You can silence it by using ipmitool. Here are the commands for controlling the fans of a Dell PowerEdge R210 II over IPMI.

Please ONLY do this if you know what you are doing and are monitoring your temperatures. Using wrong settings here can cause thermal throttling or damage to your CPU.

For this to work, you have to have "ipmitool" installed on your device. In all of the following commands, replace "IPMI-IP" with the IP-Address of your IPMI, USER with the IPMI username, PASS with your IPMI password.

This command enables manual fan control:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

This command disables manual fan control:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x01

0% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x00

5% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x05

10% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x0A

20% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14

30% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x1e

50% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x32

70% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x46

80% Fan Speed:

# ipmitool -I lanplus -H IPMI-IP -U USER -P PASS raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x50

You can also put a script on your server being executed at boot (e.g. cronjob @reboot) that executes these commands, to apply these changes after a reboot.