[Beowulf] KVM advice

[stephen mulcahy]

Hi,

Do people here normally use KVMs for management of compute nodes or 
forego those and either have a grad student with a keyboard+monitor on a 
trolley or rely entirely on remote management cards and/or IPMI?

For those of you that use KVMs, what ones do you normally use?

I'm taking a look around at the moment and for 40+ nodes, KVMs look like 
quite an expensive option. It's not clear either how well or which KVMs 
can be operated remotely.

The scenario I have is that I have ~40 nodes in a room and I would like 
to hook a KVM switch to all of these and be able to connect to the 
switch from other parts of the building. I see Avocent (for example) 
have some switches that kinda fit this model - but its not clear whether 
the Avocents can be accessed over a standard Ethernet LAN, or whether 
you have to run a dedicated CAT5 cable around your building specifically 
to connect to the KVM switch.

Any experience from others on this welcome, I've mostly relied on 
post-boot remote access, remote management cards and IPMI up to now.

Thanks,

-stephen

-- 
Stephen Mulcahy       Applepie Solutions Ltd.      http://www.aplpi.com
Registered in Ireland, no. 289353 (5 Woodlands Avenue, Renmore, Galway)