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Suggestion for KVM over IP



My last employer owned four Raritan Dominion KX-432 units.  I wound up
detesting them for several reasons, but kept them in place as a backup to the
solution we migrated into.

What was good about Raritan:  relative ease of setup, full
mouse/keyboard/graphics support, support for a couple of client options other
than just Windows.

What was bad:  the units had a bad habit of crashing every few weeks, there
was a very weird firmware bug in the keyboard logic (if you type faster than
30wpm, it inserts extra characters), they cost a lot, it becomes very
difficult to keep track of which server is connected to which KVM switch if
you have more than 2, and unless you pony up a huge amount of extra $$$, only
1 or 2 people can use the thing at a time.  That latter point makes it useless
for a busy QA lab with all 32 ports connected and two or three engineers are
up against a deadline re-imaging servers.

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. 
But the upside of that is you get to create separate DNS entries for every
console, which makes things vastly easier to manage if you've got more than a
few dozen servers.

-rich





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