[Beowulf] recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room: full cluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Joe Landman]

Rahul Nabar wrote:

> I'm not trying to be cheap here but just splurge a bit and get a
> solution that will make late hours of debugging a little more
> palatable for the sys-admins!

Most decent nodes will have IPMI and kvm over IP built in.  That and a 
reasonable serial concentrator will make your admins lives *much* easier.

We help manage clusters/storage hundreds, thousands, and often 
continents away from us.  A crash cart makes it infeasible to consider 
this.  And if the admin gets paged by someone at 3am, I am sure they 
won't want to drive in and use the crash cart to find/fix the problem.

Keep the crash cart, but don't spend more than $300 on it (monitor + 
keyboard/mouse and a cart that rolls).  It isn't for management, its for 
last resort.

-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics, Inc.
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