I used to name physical servers like pets (greek gods or whatever) and virtuals like cattle (function), with the idea that, yes, function of physical machines c

I used to name physical servers like pets (greek gods or whatever) and virtuals like cattle (function), with the idea that, yes, function of physical machines can change over time... But the problem with that logic is that the name is not only attached to the metal, it's set (and mostly so, I'd argue) in software, as the OS hostname. And then what happens next is that the motherboard of that precious pet melts down and you scramble to move those drives to a spare, and now you have two metals with the same name. It just doesn't work so well. And your fancy random or pseudorandom looking naming scheme is cool and fun until someone new comes in and asks you wtf colchicifolium is... Name machines on purpose. If the purpose changes, the OS will likely follow as well. If not, renaming shouldn't be that big of a deal, or, to put it another way: if you can't rename, you can't reinstall, and then you'll fail. Now naming hardware is the "fun" part. when is the last time you did an inventory of your motherboards? or is it disks we're naming? the raid array or individual ones? how about memory sticks? or do you only name precious server cases? ;) after all, that is where the label ends up...