In the message dated: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 13:42:06 CST,
The pithy ruminations from Dan Olson on
<Re: [lopsa-discuss] IP KVM and PDU Recommendations> were:
=> A little rosetta stone for lights out devices from different hardware
vendors:
=>
[SNIP!]
=>
=> Dell - DRAC
Dell Remote Access Controller, for those of you who want the expansion of
the FLA. :)
=> I don't have a lot of experience with these, the older ones that I've worked
=> with were awful and needed a wall wart to drive the cards functions when the
How old? Our Dell gear, some of it dating back to about 2005, has fairly
reliable DRACs, none of them with wall warts...
I'd say that there are 2 broad categories of weaknesses--too many
flavors of "DRAC" (gnerations up through 6, iDRAC vs DRAC, "enterprise"
DRAC, etc), and they try to do too many things. If you're in a Windows
shop, or manage to use all the DRAC features (remote virtual CD-ROM
for booting/installing from new media, lots of environmental reporting
that duplicates data available via SNMP, ability to configure most
BIOS settings, etc), they can be very useful, but the volume of models &
features means that there are some rough edges and makes the documentation
confusing.
All the DRACs that we've got (version 4 through iDRAC6) support IPMI
with serial redirection, so once that's configured (we do it through
recipies run at the first boot after kickstarting), we can manage machines
strictly through IPMI and serial console commands--so management access is
the same for our Dell and SuperMicro and other boxes from that point on.
=> server was turned off. Ever since 2005ish I've managed to talk all of my
=> purchasers out of buying dell gear.
While there are many things I don't love about Dell gear, I do find the
value (we get .edu pricing) and features (if you're careful to get the
correct "enterprise" model) worth of consideration vs. other vendors. The
idea of ruling out any major vendor for the last 7 years sounds like it
may not be the best service to your purchasers.
[Ick, I just realized that I sound like a Dell fanboy...must go into
the other room to genuflect in front of a Sun workstation for a while.]
Mark
=>
=> ----
=> Daniel Murphy-Olson
=> Systems Administrator
=> Mathematics & Computer Science Division
=> Argonne National Laboratory
=> 630-252-0055
=>
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