Luke S Crawford wrote: > Doug Hughes <d...@will.to> writes: > >> If you've got a decent, embedded KVM you can do a lot of things that >> you simply cannot do with a serial or even in front of the machine >> including: >> * Viewing stats from FRUs like fan and CPU temperatures >> * Forwarding alarms from same into your event management system >> * multiple levels of permission for accessing different components >> > > Yes, those things can be handy if dmidecode or lmstats doesn't give you > that info when the box is running. > > Not if the machine won't boot or is otherwise inaccessible. >> * capabilities for upgrading BIOS and or BMC when it needs it >> * ability to access a virtual CD drive either from an ISO image on your >> > > These things can be done via pxe. > > only if the thing you are doing has been converted to be PXE friendly. There are a lot of things out there where this is extremely difficult to do whereas just clicking a few buttons in the KVM makes it work. You don't have to go through any extra steps for any ISO image in this way. It has been handy for us on a number of occassions where PXE was going to take hours of mucking around to make it work.
>> * ability to see graphical things that might show up on the console >> (possibly more important if your box is windows - based) >> > > This is very important, sometimes, and if you need graphics out of band, > there is no substitute for KVM over IP. > > >> What you don't get from a serial console that you do get from sitting in >> front of the machine. >> * reset/power cycle of machine >> > > Well, you /need/ metering PDUs, right? switchable PDUs are not that much > more expensive than metering PDUs and they solve that problem. > We have the servertech smart pdu with the aggregate phase metering at 60A in a lot of places. a 60A switched PDU is a pretty expensive proposition... (are they available? They certainly aren't common. There might be a relatively new product in this space. I haven't checked in a couple of months) _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lopsa.org http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
