Does a Dell DRAC 4 PCI card have any use these days?

Question

I have inherited a couple of PowerEdge 840s and they each have a Drac 4 card, which as supposed to be used for Remote Access. The motherboard already has a Gigabit NIC and I have a couple of 4 port NCT375Ts, one of which I plan to put on the first of these machines I get going. I run a small network of mostly Windows machines (Win10 where possible) and one machine has Server 2019 on it. The plan for this machine is to put Linux on it and, among other things, have it as another router using pfsense to make some sub networks, and add some security from the outside world. Is there anything that Drac offers that can't be done anyway, or perhaps better nowadays?

Answer 1

DRAC is used for out-of-band control. You would use it when regular access to machine is not possible, for example because it crashed, or you cut off access to it via local firewall on machine etc.

Then (instead of getting in your car and driving to location) you could DRAC to get console access to machine to try to fix it there, or to power-cycle it remotely etc.

You can also use it for STONITH if you are building HA cluster or similar.