The pithy ruminations from Doug Hughes <[email protected]> on "Re: [lopsa-discuss] toward a more comfortable datacenter (KVM location)" were:
=> On 2/11/2011 11:59 AM, [email protected] wrote: => > My minor revelation after spending a few hours in the datacenter this AM, standing over a floor-vent while using the KVM: => > => > When installing a rack-mounted KVM, arrange it so that it opens onto the => > hot aisle, for operator comfort. => > => > Personally, I'd rather have a more comfortable temperature when I'm forced to work in the datacenter for an extended period, at the possible expense of increased fan noise and having to walk around the racks to reach the front of a piece of equipment. => > => > YMMV. => > => > You may not want to follow this layout for a KVM at the center of a 20-rack aisle (the sensibility of that long an uninterrupted row is another topic). => > => I like the IP/KVM builtin to the machine and operable from my => recliner.. like.. hrm.. now for instance. :) Agreed...KVM over IP is the way to go....and it's what I use for 99% of anything requiring a "keyboard", but that's only after the bootstrapping step to get the out-of-band port onto the network. I currently do not have auto-provisioning on the OOB network, so the IP/KVM builtin to the machine is only useful after the OOB device address & LAN params have been configured in the BIOS. I'm not sure that there's any way around a certain amount of keyboarding in the datacenter, whether bringing up new devices or in case of an emergency. In the scenario of installing new machines, there will be some manual configuration...for example, even if you're using ROCKS, Kickstart, etc. to do provisioning, there's generally a need to have a fixed address (and name) associated with each machine. The best workflow that I know of is: [1] start provisioning service [ROCKS, kickstart & dhcp, etc.] [2] power-on a single server [3] manual action on provisioning server to associate the network request with the new machine (maybe as simple as confirming the automatically generated & incremented hostname w/in ROCKS, or as manual as recording MAC address, assigning to hostname & IP, etc.) [4] proceed with provisioning automatically [5] repeat at step [2] for the next machine Unless each machine is on a remotely-controlled power source (and IP-enabled PDUs are too expensive for each compute node), then steps [2] and [3] require keypresses in the datacenter. Now that the BIOS config is done on a bunch of new machines--a series of boring, repetitive, cold keystrokes at the datacenter KVM--the rest of the stuff can happen remotely...including the KVM-over-IP or serial console over IP. Mark _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
