I came across another item today.

  1. Be able to fully control your machine remotes:
    • Be able to power cycle it from your desk when things go south in a major way: I know there are companies that make managed power bars which have a little embedded web server which you can use to turn on/off your machines remotely. I’m not sure how available these are for say, an 8′ rack full of 1u machines, but I wished I had one when I had to trundle down a couple floors and through 2 security doors just to push a power button. Now, if you are managing your servers in a virtualization model, some of this problem goes away; kill the process managing the virtual server and restart it. Of course, the critical point then becomes the server hosting the virtual machines, but you should not be using it for any testing activities other than being the server for the virtual ones so it should not be all that unstable.
    • Be able to get to the console without a crash cart: It used to be that each data center would have a little cart with a monitor, keyboard and mouse which was affectionately known as the crash cart which you would wheel over to a headless machine when it crashed, plug it in and fix the machines. There are now hardware and software solutions for this. One we have (partially) implemented is the Secure Console Server from Think Logical. Now if only the machine I needed to access was actually hooked up to this today… A potential problem that I do not really have an answer for at the moment is how do you connect to the console of a linux virtual server when it is running inside a windows host computer. I’m sure if I contacted a vendor they would have some story on how to do it though. Oh, and don’t forget Remote Desktop which is built into W2k and W2k3 servers.