Suggestion for KVM over IP

[Edward Ned Harvey]

> From: discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org [mailto:discuss-bounces-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org] On Behalf
> Of Daniel Feenberg
> 
> > All the above problems were solved at a very similar per-port price
point
> > ($300 give or take) using Dell DRAC or HP ILO cards.  Someone already
> pointed
> > out the negative of that solution:  you have to build out a separate
physical
> > LAN, at a cost of about $20-50 per port for cables and switches plus
labor.
> 
> Why do you have to have a separate physical LAN? We have some HP and
> SUN
> ILO devices (on the motherboards) and connect them to LAN ports on the
> same switches as the main OS uses and in the same VLAN. The ILO software
> does not appear to be particularly insecure, logins and passwords - indeed
> whole sessions are encrypted.

I guess I missed that one.  I will say I don't have a separate LAN for my
ilom devices...  Sun, Apple, and Dell.  No problem.

The main disadvantage I see about ilom is that each machine needs to be
configured.  Sure, it's just a couple of commands you paste onto a command
prompt in linux, and there are a lot of other possibilities on precisely
*how* to configure it...  But that's still more effort than simply plugging
in the VGA/USB connector.

Now that I think of it ... It depends on the number of machines.  For a
single machine, plugging in the VGA/USB cable is probably easier than
configuring ilom.  But if you've got a dozen or more machines, you pdsh once
to configure them all simultaneously, and that's easier than connecting a
wire to each one.

So I can see some specific negatives against the ilom in some specific
circumstances, but I'm not seeing any general negative.