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You don't need low-level remote management anymore? Or what specifically are you associating with the term "BMC"? (i.e. for me, "BMC" is "turn it off and on and
by detaro 5y ago
You don't need low-level remote management anymore? Or what specifically are you associating with the term "BMC"? (i.e. for me, "BMC" is "turn it off and on and force it to boot from network, remotely")
- jeffbee 5y agoCorrect. The larger my installation becomes, the less I care about the state of individual machines. The ability to promptly remediate a single broken machine becomes irrelevant at scale.
- detaro 5y agoSo if a machine behaves odd/goes away and its OS doesn't respond you don't want management plane to be able to redeploy it/run hardware checks/... automatically?
- jeffbee 5y agoIf you put it that way you make it too simple. The question is whether I want a second, smaller computer inside my larger computer that may at any time corrupt memory, monkey with network frames, turn off the power, assert PROCHOT, or do a million other bad things. It's not just a tool with benefits. It has both benefits and risks, and in my experience the risks are not worth those benefits.
- detaro 5y agobut we are talking in the context of a project which specifically aims to do these things without the baggage of other platforms. And these things are BMC functions.
- p_l 5y agoSo, you manage computers using crashcarts like in ugly old days of PC servers? I thought that had considerable issue with scaling...
- jeffbee 5y agoI guess you thought wrong. What do you think this hardware tech is doing in this video? https://youtu.be/XZmGGAbHqa0?t=224 https://youtu.be/XZmGGAbHqa0?t=224 Men with carts scale perfectly. One guy can manage 1000 machines. 2 guys can manage 2000. Perfect scaling.
- p_l 5y agoI see no crashcart there, only hw maintenance while crashcarts are where they belong, in the trash of history (yeah, google servers have BMCs) (For reference: a crash cart is a cart with monitor, keyboard, mouse, cabling for them, and possibly external drives to help you install base OS, used for when you have no remote management)
- larkost 5y agoBut at scale you now have more and more machines that are going offline. That tends to me to push the organization more and more to having something doing this sort of management. And without a BMC-like system, that means more in-person work, which again, at scale becomes a real cost burden. It sounds to me more like at the scale you are at you are no longer the person making sure that individual computers are still running, and so are forgetting that this job needs to be done.