BMC - Out-of-Band Host Management on SCVMM 2012

Server Light-Out Management (LOM) enables you to manage a physical host remotely, such as Power On and Power Off. Now, you can also do so under SCVMM 2012 when you have defined the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) settings under the managed host hardware setting. BMC is also required if you intend to use the new automatic Power Management feature in VMM. If certain hosts fall below certain load threshold (e.g. weekends), you can even allow VMM to power-off the host and power-on back when the demand is back.

Before enabling BMC, when you right-click on a host, you can't do anything to the host (i.e. grey-out), except restarting.

Once the host BMC setting is defined, you can power on and off the physical host under the SCVMM console.

System Prerequisites
According to Microsoft Technet, the host must have a BMC installed that supports one of the following out-of-band management protocols:

• Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) versions 1.5 or 2.0
• Data Center Management Interface (DCMI) version 1.0
• System Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH) version 1.0 over WS-Management (WS-Man)

Example: Dell Remote Access Controller (DRAC)
Dell DRAC supports IPMI 2.0. By default, it's not enabled. Hence, you must first enable it and configure the appropriate OOB IP address on the BIOS setting by pressing during system start-up.

Once the VMM server has connectivity to the Dell DRAC, you can now proceed to configure BMC setting under the Hardware properties as shown below.

Try power off and power on the host!