Consolidating on one manufacturer?

[mmmann]

I think this is the proper place to post this question(?)

If I start building out a rack, should I be attempting to consolidate on a single manufacturer? I understand that most servers come with a Management Interface, and I suppose they all differ somewhat, much like BIOS interfaces differ. Are they all similar enough, or would I be well advised to learn ONE and then seamlessly switch between machines?

Right now I'm looking at Dell PowerEdge, HP ProLiant, Lenovo Think Server. I presume that they all support IPMI (which I have yet to use) and IPMI "...is supported by more than 200 computer systems vendors, such as Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NEC Corporation, SuperMicro and Tyan" (Wikipedia).

In addition to the Management Interface, are there other reasons to pick ONE vendor? Interoperability? Compatibility? Extensibility? Useful but vendor-specific enhancements that require like-same machines?

Thank you for advice on best practices in building out a rack.

 

[Patrick]

Great question.

On the HP and Dell side as examples, they both have fairly robust (yet costly) management software that you can add on and they can go beyond just servers.

At a smaller scale, more generic IPMI is fairly easy to use (ex Supermicro, Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock Rack)

BIOS wise everything is pretty easy to learn across vendors so I would not worry too much there. Plus, you are likely to setup BIOS once per machine.

It is probably easier to pick one manufacturer, however I actually use different vendors as a "just in case" and have a highly heterogeneous mix. At a large scale it would be very hard to manage. At a smaller scale, it is not too bad.

Now, where I did finally standardize is on Ubuntu for Linux. That got me much more in terms of making things easy to manage.

 

[Blinky 42]

If building out for yourself, and you will be supporting it long term I wouldn't worry about standardizing on a single vendor.

If you are doing a project for someone else, or others will be called upon to support it down the road then you may want to consider minimizing the # of variants just to keep things smooth when training folks.
Most of the time you will just need the KVM functions to check on the console and reboot when required. With more capable browsers the management interfaces have improved radically over the years, but most still require you to run some java or plugin for full control.

Remote media is frequently an option that costs more or requires an "advanced" license key with the name-brands. Remote media can can come in handy for doing totally remote installs or diagnosis/repair of issues, but you have to be able to access the management interface when the servers are offline otherwise it doesn't do any good (if the server acts as the VPN endpoint or router, you can't get to is when it is down). I would also caution against having any of the management interfaces assigned public IPs directly.

As Patrick mentioned the same applies for Linux distribution or windows versions too - keeping the total variations in use down will make your life easier over time.

Oh and remember to add consoleblank=0 in for your kernel boot line so if there is a problem and the server hung, the screen isn't blank when you log into the interface to see what happened.

 

[mmmann]

Good input & advice; thank you very much.

 

[T_Minus]

It's very easy to get all supermicro gear if you want to consolidate and get great deals on used gear at ebay all in one swoop. I went from a mix of hardware with 0 IPMI to supermicro with all IPMI, and wow... it's awesome time saver.

The Intel chassis I've also had in my hands were VERY impressive too. The build quality, and how they just fit perfect each time... might have been that they were brand new, but they sure fit perfect, and everything was impressively laid out, and configured.