The newer Dell boxes also come with IMPI over Ethernet that can be used to do some out of band monitoring/maintenance, and the older boxes have the 'BMC' backplane - although I've not looked into that all that much. I've yet to see what the new range (1950s etc..) have in the way of remote management.
I got a sales pitch from Dell before the [12]950's were released. The DRAC5's on them sounded like improved some of the crappiness of the DRAC4's (buggy Java clients, etc). One sexy bit (and this is a retelling of something from a salesdroid, so, add salt) was that the interface for the DRAC could be used for nongigabit in-OS connectivity. I said to the droid, "So, I could use the DRAC port for out-of-band and SSHing into the base domain of a VMWare or Xen, and keep the gigabits to bond for the guest OS'es?", which got a response of "you're not the first person to ask that, and, yes, that's possible." Still waiting on work to get a 2950 in for me to play with, to that end. Still waiting to see if the as-yet-unreleased 860's (the 850 replacement) are the right thing for my home setup. -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
