Introduction
Familiarity with the IPMI 2.0 specification is assumed in this chapter.
To offer greater ease of debugging, existing and future Cisco servers may offer more sensors than the 255 the current IPMI specification can handle. Thus, certain B-series and C-series Cisco servers extend the sensor and sensor related features of the IPMI 2.0 specification. This chapter describes these extensions so that IPMI tool users can use the extensions effectively.
For sensors whose sensor number is less than or equal to 255, Cisco remains compliant to IPMI specification. For sensors whose sensor number is greater than or equal to 256 (the extended sensor range or ESR), Cisco adds equivalent sensor-related IPMI commands as Cisco OEM IPMI commands. A sensor in the extended sensor range is referred to as a Cisco extended sensor (CES). Additionally, the IPMI specification does not constrain implementations to consecutively number all sensors. Thus, depending on the Cisco server and CIMC software version, there may be sensors in ESR that are not in the IPMI range even though there is room in the IPMI range.
The open source programs IPMITool and OpenIPMI will not be modified to integrate Cisco's ESR functionality. However, these tools provide the ability to issue raw IPMI commands and thus allow you to write a wrapper to process the ESR functionality.