[TriLUG] Re: remote hardware management

[Greg Cox]

> 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.