ServeTheHome.com

Over the weekend I experienced an oddly inaccessible network share on a Windows Home Server instance running in Hyper-V using Windows Server 2008 R2. Unfortunately I was not at my desk at the time but did have 3G access and a laptop. As I am a big proponent of KVM-over-IP and remote power cycle features of many server boards, this was a great chance to demonstrate a use-case. Read the full story

The ability to remotely monitor servers utilizing IPMI 2.0 is a key differentiator between server grade hardware and consumer hardware. Supermicro’s IPMIview software is an often overlooked piece of software that makes managing multiple servers remotely a simple task. While there is a simple web interface that Supermicro uses on many of its boards, the IPMI 2.0 features, including KVM-over-IP can also be accessed through a utility that Supermicro provides. For those users with multiple systems, IPMIview allows for up to twenty machines to be managed and monitored at a time from a remote PC. Best of all, with the KVM-over-IP features, remote temperature and fan speed monitoring, and the ability to remotely power cycle machines, a user can put a system into service never attaching an optical drive, keyboard, mouse or monitor to the machine. Frankly, for larger small business and home servers (8+ drives) this should be considered a must have, especially given the fact that oftentimes at least two storage servers are maintained for redundancy purposes. IPMIview makes this multi-server management very easy because one can easily VPN into the network and manage multiple servers from one desktop application. Read the full story

My main server, the Big WHS now houses over 60TB of storage, runs multiple VM’s, and has over 10 Gigabit NICs. At the heart of this server, is a Supermicro X8ST3-F. It was not the first motherboard I tried in the server, as I originally tried using an ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer in the Big WHS, but it has been running solidly since its first installation. Aside from its stability, it also comes with many PCIe slots, an onboard LSI 1068e based 8 port SATA/ SAS controller, dual Intel Gigabit NICs, onboard video, and IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP.

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