Tales of Hardware – IBM RSA-II slimline
Published March 10th, 2009 by Barney DesmondIn a recent post I mentioned that there are some nice things about using Supermicro hardware here at Anchor. There’s a bit of a dark lining to that silver cloud, however – we’ve had the worst luck trying to get their IPMI stuff to work in any sane way.
IPMI is short for Intelligent Platform Management Interface. Different companies have different names for the technology – Dell has this in their DRAC cards, HP calls this iLO, Sun calls it ALOM. IPMI basically gives you access to a bunch of diagnostic information and management controls for the server. The real killer feature is remote console. Because IPMI is largely independent of the rest of the system, you can get unimpeded access to everything on the server, regardless of what state it’s in. Just like The Matrix, you need to experience how great it is when you rescue a downed server from a BSOD, or a dopey prompt holding up the BIOS while booting.
You see that? IPMI just saved you from:
- Walking all the way to the datacentre
- Going through six proximity card doors and an airlock
- Getting to your suite
- Opening the racks
- Finding the server
- Hooking up a keyboard and monitor
- Hitting F1 to get past that pesky “keyboard not found” error
- Walking back to the office – congratulations, you just wasted your lunchtime