You have to install it on the host OS, it won’t pass through the commands to a VM. That is also why racadm didn’t work installed on a VM. As for pulling the drive, it is fine most of the time, but it would be better to do it with offlining the drive first, but if you can’t have downtime that is better than leaving the array degraded. Having downtime to reconfigure the drac is the best option though.
The situation is as follows: I have a PowerEdge T620 that has had a failed drive in an unknown RAID configuration for a year now (!). According to the T620 manual, I need to disable the faulty drive through iDRAC before I can replace it and rebuild the array. Unfortunately, I don't have the login credentials for the iDRAC - the server was set up by a technology consultancy which claims to have already deleted/passed on all relevant password data (They did, but overlooked the iDRAC credentials when doing so...). The server is running ESXi 5 with several mission critical Windows Server 2012 R2 VMs. My goal is to reset the iDRAC password (perhaps using OMSA?) WITHOUT triggering a reboot, so that I can replace the failed drive, add a hot spare or two, and rest easy. Is this possible? I've tried using racadm, but uinstalled it after getting an "Unable to communicate with the BMC" error. I'm wary of installing OMSA because I don't want it to trigger a reboot, but if that fear is unwarranted I'd be willing to try it. I have access to vCenter, ESXi (over SSH), and all of the Windows VMs. Just not the iDRAC. I'm also almost 100% sure that the username is root or administrator, but don't know the password (not that that helps much). I'll answer any questions as best I can. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!
Resetting an iDRAC 7 password on a T620 without rebooting