-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 01/14/2011 08:39 PM, Brad Knowles wrote: > On Jan 14, 2011, at 12:16 PM, Brodie, Kent wrote: > >> The past year we've been purchasing Dell poweredge servers - lots of >> R710's, but also many of the other PowerEdge models. The drac6 >> management modules work well for me. The perc controllers do raid >> nicely. When we've had to contact Dell for service, they've been >> responsive. > > The Dell servers I've seen require the use of PCs running Windows and Internet Explorer to perform certain systems administration tasks, like updating firmware, some aspects of remote console access, configuring the PERC RAID controllers, etc.... They do things like Active-X plug-ins that download from the server to your browser, and if you're not running IE on Windows, then you're screwed. > > Personally, I would stay away from Dell unless pretty much all the other machines you've got would be running Windows. If you have any admins who prefer to use Linux as their desktop OS, or Mac OS X as their desktop OS, or need to be able to perform these kinds of things remotely from a handheld device like a smartphone, then you are likely to run into various problems with the Dell hardware. > > I'd rather go with HP or one of the more *nix friendly lesser-known vendors, like Iron Systems, SuperMicro, etc.... Of course, I'm a little biased towards Iron Systems, since they are heavily used at ISC and f.root-servers.net, which I'm sure is only partly influenced by the fact that Paul Vixie is one of the principals involved with Iron Systems.
All the Dell systems made in the last five years or so have support firmware updates with RHEL (and maybe SLES too). A lot of the DRAC/BMC functionality is configurable using IPMI, but some does require installing OpenManage or a vendor-specific tool (like MegaCli). The serial console can be redirect over IPMI too, so using IE isn't a requirement. - -- - -- - -- Skylar Thompson ([email protected]) - -- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk0xEnEACgkQsc4yyULgN4ZP9wCePnLDkAyQhh6j0j9EEGxI1N6P nakAoKn0db854y62LWw/HYWfGbFaw4OC =CofU -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
