Long ago I wrote a post on how to reset the ILO on a HP Proliant server via the command line, as this was often necessary to get a slow responding ILO responding again.
Cisco has included similar functionality in the CIMC CLI, instructions below.
esx01# scope cimc esx01 /cimc # reboot This operation will reboot the CIMC. Continue?[y|N]y
The scope command above allows you to attach to a specific module, so in this instance we are attaching to the CIMC module.
Note: The two links below have quite a good bit of information on the CLI
How do you get to the cimc command line from the OS if the NIC is down?
According to Cisco you can get to the CIMC CLI three different ways
You can launch the CIMC CLI in the following ways:
1) By the serial port.
2) Over the network by SSH.
3) From the router by using the ucse slot session imc command.
More info here
Wow, thanks, that is pretty bad. There should be someway to access the cimc from the OS level, DELL, HP, and IBM all have a way to get to their respective racs from the OS in case you have to fail over the nic or just check on hardware, etc…
Physically going to the box to get in isn’t always an option when the NIC is dead…
Well there might be some OS level tools that I am not aware of. It’s been a couple of years since I touched Cisco servers.
I’m rather sceptical about CIMC CLI being indeed available via serial port for Release 1.0, but it’s definitely not an option for the newer versions. We had 3 C220 M3 with unresponsive CIMC lately. The interfaces were unreachable neither by http(s) nor by ssh. We’ve unsuccesfully tried to use serial port on C220 M3(CIMC 2.x) and C220 M4(CIMC 3.x). Serial connection allows to work in preboot environment(BIOS/CIMC config utility/etc) and in shell of currently booted OS, granted that it’s configured on the OS side and serial port redirection is enabled in BIOS(it is not by default).
The OS options are ipmitool or ipmiutil. Both utilities allow to reset bmc.