Suggestion for KVM over IP

[Rich Braun]

Matt Shields suggested:
> Everyone should have some type of
> datacenter/server room asset/rack/IP/cable management system in place.
> Whether it's home grown or something like http://racktables.org/

Good point.  I always build my own inventory-management system.  Labor cost of
keeping it updated depends on how good the discovery scripts are (those which
periodically comb through the data center to pick up machine-readable info
like hostnames, MAC addresses, motherboard serial numbers and such--facter is
your friend).

The DRAC solution for KVM has the advantage of a 1-to-1 physical connection
between console and server ports; the Raritan solution is typically set up as
32-to-1 which means the asset tracking database can be a bit of work to keep
up to date.  Most engineers, I've found, can't be bothered with a manual
asset-update procedure so a QA lab quickly gets out of date as console ports
are moved around constantly.

Thanks for bringing up this point, Matt.

-rich