KVM vs. Serial consoles

My day is winding down and it's too late to start any big projects. So I wandered over to an internal "Sun News" site to see what is happening.

There I read about Canberra-based power, gas and water utility ActewAGL's decision to switch from H-P servers to Sun. (Click here to read it for yourself). There it states that this customer has purchased "six Sun FireV440 servers, two Sun Rack 900 cabinets and two KVM switches for its core applications, which include Gentrack billing systems, Oracle financials and an Esri spatial information system."

KVM switches? Do they mean "Keyboard Video Mouse" or has that acronym been taken over by some other new technical whatzis? I started here at Sun supporting serial consoles and still take those calls, so I'm biased toward good old fashioned dumb terminals, terminal servers (a.k.a. console servers) and the like. (my mantra: "9600, 8 databits, no parity, 1 stop bit") I'm not alone. This argument comes up on comp.unix solaris like clockwork about every 6 months typically after some person innocently asks "What type of KVM should I buy for my Sun Systems?"

I also know from talking to customers that certain apps (read GUI apps) require more than a command line. I know from my experience using and supporting Sun's products that command line utilities and tools often have more features and are more stable and less flakey. But that's in the Sun world. In the Microsoft Windows world, it's the opposite: the GUIs rule and the command line utilities are flakey.

The best advice for those who want a KVM switch is that you need to get one that specifically supports Sun. Or in other words, don't pay your NET 30 days for your KVM until you are certain that every little thing you want to do with the KVM works. At least that's what I'd tell ActewAGL if they were to ask.

Posted on: Jun 06, 2005

Posted by: swas

Category: Supporting Solaris

Tags: none

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Comments:

The other side of the coin is that if you are buying Opteron hardware from Sun, you can count on lots of headaches if you are not fully tooled to support an x86 environment. Key factors are:

  • Don't count on your new V20z and V40z being configured properly to even talk to the serial console from the system controller. Most likely there will be a speed mismatch between the SC, the BIOS (get rid of the BIOS!), and the OS.
  • Unless your network environment supports DHCP and PXE, you will not be able to boot off the network.
  • Unless you can boot off of the network, with a customized bootenv.rc, you can count on having to have a boot CD/DVD and a floppy with a bootenv.rc file that sets the console input and output to /dev/ttya. I hope grub fixes this...
  • Because of the two items above, you will need a crash cart with a keyboard, VGA (or better) monitor, and mouse (or hookups to a KVM switch...) in most environments that are really Solaris/SPARC shops.

I would be very happy if Sun would make their x86 boxes work as well out of the box with a terminal console as the SPARC boxes do.

Furthermore, it is rediculous that in the typical corporate environment with Windows desktops that Sun has not come out with a product that makes it easy for the UNIX administrator with a Windows desktop/laptop to get a secure desktop session from a Solaris server. Microsoft has a huge lead here. I would really love it if Sun would release the rumored java sunray client and include the sunray server in Solaris.

Posted by Mike Gerdts on June 06, 2005 at 09:16 PM EDT #

Well serial is all well and good. But what if English is your Second Language, or, not even part of your makeup. Serial seems to fall short here doesn't it. I'm currently working on a massive project with a 'double byte' country. Most of the engineers, application developers and managers cannot speak English. These guys have over 100 Sun servers, all equiped with a Video Card, and connected to an IP KVM switch (yes Internet Protocol Keyboard Video Mouse Switch). It is the only way to manage the systems in a consistant manner. KVM's must be supplied and supported for this reason alone. Does Sun want to tap into the expanding China marketplace? Will serial/vt100 support double byte countries? KVM's make plenty of sense on SPARC too. In fact i'd love to see the next range of Sun systems come with some kind of graphics built into the motherboard chipset. It would certainly help with losing a PCI slot in an already constrained machine like a V210. Sure there are 'other' ways around this like doing a remote X connection to the system but admin need a way onto the system to see OBP and Kernel boot messages. You can't do this without a KVM.

Posted by Ian McGinley on June 06, 2005 at 10:44 PM EDT #

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