User guide

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Figure 1 iDRAC physical connections
Access to iDRAC6 from a local user of the server is assumed to be mitigated by operating system
authentication as mentioned later in this paper. The primary focus of security measures is to prevent
attacks from remote users through a network.
As shown in the picture, there are two possible ways to connect the iDRAC6 to a network. First, the
iDRAC6 is accessible over the same network as the server’s embedded NIC interfaces. This is called the
“Shared NIC” and is described in the next section. Second, the iDRAC6 Enterprise card is an orderable
option for iDRAC6 and provides a dedicated management port that is used only by the iDRAC6. One
advantage of the dedicated port is to contain all management traffic on an isolated network with no
effect on the bandwidth of the server’s network ports. Another potentially more important advantage
can be that it provides iDRAC6 isolation for security purposes for servers behind a firewall and directly
accessible from the internet. The disadvantage of the dedicated NIC is additional cabling.
Broadcast and multicast protection are provided in the iDRAC6 software. If a threshold number of
received packets are reached within a short period of time, the iDRAC6 turns on broadcast and multicast