[Beowulf] impressions of Super Micro IPMI management cards?

[Craig West]

Chris,

I'm using the SIMSO version of the IPMI cards on my machines. No 
problems using them for what I wanted them for. Remote power, remote 
sensor monitoring and controlling both the BIOS and boot (via Grub) for 
Linux. I have also been able to boot Linux, monitor the boot process 
over the serial line and login on the serial line (via IPMI).

The motherboards I have use Intel NICs and this means I can use the 
out-of-band access to the card. Allows me to use a single Ethernet cable 
for both normal traffic and IPMI. I've also configured the IP/Mac 
addresses of the cards entirely from Linux (utils provided by SuperMicro).

I've not run the KVM over LAN option. Apparently I can't with my setup 
anyway (this is documented).
Power up and Serial over LAN work fine from Linux via ipmitool - and 
there is also the Java based GUI SuperMicro application.

> I'm currently looking at a whitebox server vendor and the remote 
> management technology they propose is a Super Micro IPMI add-on card, 
> apparently from this family of products: 
> http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/SIM.cfm
>
> My needs are pretty minimal -- remote power control. BIOS access and 
> the ability to trigger a PXE boot off the network. Anything else is 
> just supplemental.
>
> Does anyone have any experience/impressions of the "Supermicro 
> Intelligent Management" stuff?
P.S. I am also running SuperMicro Systems - I don't know if (or how 
well) they work on other boards.

They work for what I need,

Craig