Dell Chassis Management Controller Information

The Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC) is a systems management component designed to manage one or more Dell PowerEdge system containing blade servers – PowerEdge M1000, M1000e, and VRTX servers. Unlike a tower or rack server, a blade server cannot run by itself; it requires a compatible blade enclosure. Blade servers are typically optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy while still providing ample computing power.


The term “blade” or “blades” is largely interchangeable with the term “server node” when referring to the Dell PowerEdge VRTX platform, though the blades themselves are not interchangeable between different types of enclosures. Thus a server node from Dell PowerEdge VRTX is not physically compatible with the M1000e due to slightly different physical connections. The CMC is a hot-pluggable module within a Dell blade platform, has its own microprocessor and memory, and is powered by the modular chassis into which it is plugged - like the M1000e or the previously mentioned VRTX, regardless of enclosure. It provides a secure browser-based interface that enables an IT administrator to take inventory, perform configuration and monitoring tasks, remotely power on/off blade servers and enable alerts for events on servers and components in the blade chassis. This ability is embedded into the module and requires no additional software installations.

One of the features of the CMC is multi-chassis management. This capability (which was introduced in CMC version 3.1) can monitor up to 9 fully loaded chassis with no additional cabling via a single web interface.

The CMC interface integrates with iDRAC module from each blade or server node, so that administrators can perform server-specific iDRAC functions such as performing updates, changing settings, or opening a remote console session from the CMC interface.


You can also capture a complete Chassis Inventory across all of your chassis that will return detailed information on all of the blades, IO modules, iDRAC cards, etc. in your environment.

For additional help or information, please refer to the Dell TechCenter Chassis Management Controller wiki.