Server management from your beach chair

As a server farm matures, its managers often come to lean on KVM switches, because using a single keyboard, video, and mouse to control a small stack of servers and/or workstations is vastly more efficient. But as a stack grows, managers find themselves tied to the noisy computer room by their switches’ limited range.

Enter a new generation of IP-enabled KVMs. The secret sauce of IP allows remote collaboration and control, so the exact same display can be seen in your remote NOC in Sao Paulo, Brazil, while the expert in Paris collaborates from home.

We put three KVMs to the test and found that, although they may share the same acronym, they are each suited to different markets. Avocent and Raritan’s higher-end and midmarket solutions move away from the old proprietary KVM cables to sleek new dongles hanging off of CAT5 cables -- pushing your range out to 30 meters. The lower-end StarTech.com KVM uses relatively normal KVM cables to extend your range.

Anyone who has set up a traditional KVM knows the pain of rerouting thick, fixed-length KVM cables through their server racks. Such cable pain is easing now, as KVM vendors pick up the trend toward using the same UTP (unshielded twisted pair) wire -- CAT5 -- that has been used for years with Ethernet. With some solutions offering 30 meters of CAT5 to work with, cleaning up the rat’s nest in your server racks isn’t quite so daunting.

Our only gripe about this new generation of KVMs is how all vendors have tied their remote power control to their power strips. Being able to remotely power cycle a hung server without driving into the office is even better than sliced bread; but we would have loved a power-down command tied to a customizable macro to accommodate legacy power devices.

Avocent DSR1021 and DSView 3.0

Avocent sent us Version 3 of its DSView console aggregation server software, plus the DSR1021 KVM. After getting over the sticker shock of DSView’s required dedicated Windows server, we started to see the benefits of the DSR1021’s hub/spoke aggregation: You can allocate resources to follow your organization’s layout, while giving all your remote systems administrators a single sign-on.

Well-thought-out touches such as subnet device discovery, a long list of keystroke macros, and several levels of organizational hierarchy make learning to use DSView easy. DSView supports LDAP/NT Domain/Active Directory or Radius authentication to control access with resources grouped by server, location, department, or site.

The DSR1021’s initial setup process was a bit disappointing because the network settings can be changed only through the console serial port despite having a perfectly good local console available. The local console interface, OSCAR (On-Screen Configuration and Activity Reporting) gives the user a great deal of control, enough that we wondered why it didn’t have the password enabled by default. OSCAR’s floating control window names and groups the servers attached to the KVM in a neat, easy-to-read display, all while allowing control over multiple, scalable remote sessions.

Although it isn’t an embedded piece of the KVM, DSView is a superb management tool; the UI is simple but powerful. You can set each server’s site, location, department, and contact information -- a nice feature to have if you must find one of the servers to fix a problem.