Networked keyboard, video and mouse (also known as KVM via IP) is the third major step forward in server operations management. The first step was mounting servers in racks, while analog KVM provided the second step. You can imagine what server farms would look like without these advances.
KVM via IP lets you control servers from a greater distance than analog KVM did. While analog KVM devices and servers typically must be within several feet of each other, KVM via IP extends server control across the breadth of your IP network or even the Internet.
In addition to access over 10/100 Ethernet, you often can use a dial-up connection or Web browser to control your servers. KVM via IP devices helps monitor server health, scales better than analog KVM, offers multi-user access and, to an extent, reduces the complexity of the jungle of cables connected to your servers. Because you can daisy-chain KVM via IP devices, they are highly scalable.
KVM via IP devices digitise keyboard, video and mouse signals into compressed and encrypted IP datastreams. The networked KVM data flows to a central unit to which the physical keyboard, monitor and mouse are attached. Unless you have plenty of spare bandwidth on your regular network, putting the KVM devices on their own network segment is a good idea. High-resolution video data, even compressed, can chew up production bandwidth you might not want to allocate to KVM. 'Out-of-band' KVM also can provide access to your servers even when routers or other 'in-band' network components fail. The central unit may have a serial port to which you connect a modem for remote access, and it may even provide Web-based server management via a browser-based Java applet.
Avocent's DSR1800 is a network-based KVM unit with PS/2, Sun and universal serial bus (USB) server ports. The company's DSR2161 uses standard Category 5 cabling to connect servers to the KVM switch, which means you can locate the DSR2161 farther from the servers.
The future of KVM via IP
The next significant step forward in server operations management will likely be the natural extension of Bluetooth wireless technology to connect servers to a nearby central unit, which could then connect to a physical keyboard, monitor and mouse. A wireless device attached to each server would only need to have keyboard, video and mouse ports for the short cables from the server, along with a radio link with a radius of a few hundred feet. This approach would virtually eliminate the cable jungles that plague many server farms.
Alternatively, for Windows, Solaris, AIX and other operating systems, KVM vendors might opt to write drivers that intercept keyboard, video and mouse data and shunt that data to a central unit via a network interface card in the server. The driver alternative will be less attractive to customers who abhor adding any software to their established corporate standard server configurations. On the other hand, converting KVM data into network data directly inside the server via driver software means that a server would need only one connection to the outside world - the network cable.
Another suggestion is adding SNMP to KVM devices (FreeVisionIP already supports SNMP). For KVM via IP systems that have a separate out-of-band network segment connection between the servers and the KVM-attached keyboard, monitor and mouse, SNMP does not make sense. However, if you send KVM via IP data in-band, across your company's regular network, using Hewlett-Packard's OpenView or other network management system products to handle SNMP alerts from KVM devices could be quite useful.
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