Capabilities
A complete remote management system allows remote reboot, shutdown, powering on; hardware sensor monitoring (fan speed, power voltages, chassis intrusion, etc.); broadcasting of video output to remote terminals and receiving of input from remote keyboard and mouse (KVM over IP). It also can access local media like a DVD drive, or disk images, from the remote machine. If necessary, this allows one to perform remote installation of the operating system. Remote management can be used to adjust BIOS settings that may not be accessible after the operating system has already booted. Settings of hardware RAID or RAM clocking can also be adjusted as the management card needs no hard drives or main memory to operate.
As management via a serial port has traditionally been important on servers, a complete remote management system also allows one to talk with the server through this port (SOL console).
As sending monitor output through the network is bandwidth intensive, cards like MegaRAC use built-in video compression (versions of VNC are often used in implementing this). Devices like Dell DRAC also have a slot for a memory card where an administrator may keep server-related information independently from the main hard drive.
The remote system can be accessed either through an SSH command line interface, specialized client software, or through various web browser-based solutions. Client software is usually optimized to manage multiple systems easily.
There are also various scaled-down versions, up to devices that only allow remote reboot by power cycling the server. This helps if the operating system hangs but only needs reboot to recover.
Remote management can be enabled on many computers (not necessarily only servers) by adding a remote management card (while some cards only support a limited list of motherboards). Newer server motherboards often have built-in remote management and need no separate management card.
Read more about this topic: Out-of-band Management
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