I manage hundreds of servers at work. They each have a BMC (remote power on/off, reset, KVM, etc) and we need to use those features frequently. I’ve been using a Google Docs spreadsheet to track their URLs, what each box is used for, specs, etc but it feels like a dynamic web app would be better for this purpose. Does anyone use anything like this? Did you make your own?
Check out NetBox. It is a free open source datacenter inventory management and IP address management tool. It will let you catalog all of your physical assets along with the network assignments.
+1 for netbox.
Administrating a bunch of network devices and/or servers, etc… Netbox is the way.
There are inventory programs, many of them, that will handle keeping system information updated.
I am posting to say that I tend to set the IPs to match with a known offset.
For example:
192.168.5.12 is the host.
192.168.105.12 is the BMC.A wiki is the great for documentation of use, links, and files.
At my company, we just have a standardized remote management suffix that we just throw at the end of the hostname, so we don’t actually track the urls. For example the server is named frosty, the url would be frostysuffix.
Then we track our servers with either an outdated access database that nobody updates, my locally saved personal Excel sheet, or by logging into one of the 4 different health checking applications that each monitor a piece of the infrastructure. (This part actually really sucks and I hate it.)
We use a separate subdomain. For example, all our hosts are joined to the ad.example.com domain, so remote management would be the same hostname on ilo.example.com.
We also have all HP hardware (at least for servers), so we have everything in OneView. Other devices (NetScaler SDX appliances, other stuff with management interfaces) just have their interface in that subdomain and it works out great.
Did you ever use HP SIM? I guess it’s not one to one features, but newer. Curious if it’s worth the time.
I have not. I don’t handle our hardware much, so I’m not entirely sure what we’re using.
Look into getting a CMDB and keep track of all of your hardware. That can store the hostname / IPs of your KVM / OS or virtualization layer, vkernels, storage adapter IPs, your vCenters and so on and so forth. If your data is getting so big that spreadsheets are getting tough to manage, then you probable need a more enterprise method of storing it.
Examples: ServiceNow, Connectwise, Jira Service Desk
Thinking out loud but wouldn’t chrome bookmarks for the URLs backed up to a file/account work better than a sheet of it’s just for access?
As we have mostly Windows based machines we look after everything is in Pulseway or TeamViewer. Routers and misc tend to be on specific ports on their connections IP and we have a shared Keeper repository for passwords and notes.
The company I work for has been buying other companies and customers like is silly season in the last year so we are digesting all the extra crud that came with it and trying to streamline half a dozen CRM, RM and Monitoring systems at the moment.
This seems like a good use case for a cluster manager. I’ve used xCAT in the past and recently Lenovo has an interesting project called Confluent that includes a web interface. A paid option would be Bright. These are made to manage hundreds to thousands of nodes.
