I'd like to move towards improving or even replacing our existing
KVM support on the Tier2 machines. Currently, we have KVM access to
~12 Tier2 machines (all on the CMS rack); this leaves a handful of
machines on the CMS rack as well as all of our compute and dCache
nodes outside of KVM coverage. Needless to say, addressing system
crashes and other hardware problems on headless machines is...slow.
I've investigated various KVM upgrade paths but most seem to be
prohibitively expensive (~$50,000 - $80,000 for moderate coverage in
the cluster). The best alternative appears to be IPMI[0].
Supermicro supplies add-on cards[1] compatible with the majority of
our recent purchases (g7 - g12 and core systems). Each card costs
about $100 and provides temperature, fan and other hardware
diagnostics (via command line or SNMP); remote power control; and
serial/KVM-over-LAN.
I'd like to purchase a card or two to test the features (especially
serial- and KVM-over-LAN). If the cards are any good, I'd like to
purchase enough to cover our critical CMS servers. Eventually, I'd
like to expand coverage to compute and dCache nodes as well.
Barring objections, I'll order two from Kingstar next week and
report back here after I've given them a spin.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPMI
[1] http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/SIM.cfm
--
o--------------------------{ Will Maier }--------------------------o
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*--------------------[ UW High Energy Physics ]--------------------*
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