hardware for home use large storage / remote management KVM card

[Miroslav Lachman]

Svein Skogen (Listmail Account) wrote:
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> On 09.02.2010 15:37, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> *SNIP*
>>
>> I can't agree with the last statement about HP's iLO. I have addon card
>> in ML110 G5 (dedicated NIC), the card is "expensive" and bugs are
>> amazing. The management NIC freezes once a day (or more often) with
>> older firmware and must be restarted from inside the installed system by
>> IPMI command on "localhost". With newer firmware, the interface is
>> periodicaly restarded. The virtual media doesn't work at all. It is my
>> worst experience with remote management cards.
>> I believe that other HP servers with built-in card with different FW is
>> working better, this is just my experience.
>>
>> Next one is eLOM in Sun Fire X2100 (shared NIC using bge + ASF). ASF
>> works without problem, but virtual media works only if you are
>> connecting by IP address, not by domain name (from Windows machines) and
>> there is some issue with timeouts of virtual media / console.
>> I reported this + 8 different bugs of web management interface to Sun
>> more than year ago - none was fixed.
>>
>> Next place is for IBM 3650 + RSA II card (dedicated NIC). Expensive,
>> something works, somthing not. For example the card can't read CPU
>> temperature, so you will not recieve any alert in case of overheating.
>> (it was 2 years ago, maybe newer firmware is fixed)
>>
>> Then I have one Supermicro Twin server 6016TT-TF with built-in IPMI /
>> KVM with dedicated NIC port. I found one bug with fan rpm readings (half
>> the number compared to BIOS numbers) and one problem with FreeBSD 7.x
>> sysinstall (USB keyboard not working, but sysinstall from 8.x works
>> without problem). In installed FreeBSD system keyboard and virtual media
>> is working without problems.
>>
>> On the top is Dell R610 DRAC (dedicated NIC) - I didn't find any bugs
>> and there are a lot more features compared to concurrent products.
>>
>
> I think the general consensus here is "nice theory lousy
> implementation", and the added migraine of no such thing as a common
> standard.
>
> Maybe creating a common standard for this could be a nice GSOC project,
> to build a nice "remote console" based on SSH and arm/mips?
>
> p.s. I've seen the various proprietary remote console solutions. They
> didn't really impress me much, so I ended up using off-the-shelf
> components for building my servers. Not necessarily cheaper, but at
> least it's under _MY_ control.
>
> //Svein

Does anybody have experiences with ATEN IP8000 card?
I found it today
http://www.aten.com/products/productItem.php?pcid=2006041110563001&psid=20060411131311002&pid=20080401180847001&layerid=subClass1

It is not cheap, but it seems as universal solution for any motherboard 
with PCI slot.

"Host-side OS support - Windows 2000/2003/XP
/NT/VistaRedhat 7.1 and above; FreeBSD, Novell"

Miroslav Lachman