Microsoft Aims To Cure Server-Hugging Engineers

1sockchuck writes "Microsoft wants the engineers in its labs to manage their servers remotely, and is moving development servers from a bevy of computer rooms in labs to a new green data center about 8 miles from its Redmond campus. 'I see today as a real transition point in our culture,' said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist at Microsoft, who acknowledged that the change will be an adjustment for veteran developers but will save money and energy use. Microsoft expects its customers will run their apps remotely in data centers, and clearly expects the same of its employees."

Perfect application for VMWare

[Rich0]

This sort of thing is a perfect application for VMWare. Create some interface where engineers can order up a server, and poof, a cloned vmware system is provided to them. Then they can have console-level access to that single server and do whatever they want with it. When they're done they hit a button, and poof it is disposed of. Since these kinds of development systems tend to sit around idle most of the time you can oversubscribe the hardware.

If you must use physical servers then there are lots of remote administration options. Of course good old RDP works just fine for 95% of the tasks. If you're actually working on OS-level changes then you might need a way to remotely boot off of CDs and get remote console-level access. Lots of server-grade solutions provide this kind of capability. VMWare does as well.

Re:Wait what?

[L0rdJedi]

I remote into my servers too, but do you really want to drive eight miles away to diagnose a potential hardware issue, or relinquish physical control to a dedicated hardware monkey?

I already do if I'm working on a server at night and it becomes unresponsive or fails to reboot properly. Work is about 7 miles from home. If the server isn't back up within 10 mins of a restart, it's off to the office to figure out why.

During working hours the only time I need physical access to anything is when I'm changing the backup tapes...that's once a week. I do everything through RDP and VNC.

how do you reboot it ?

[sniperu]

For all the people who are wondering how do you remotely reboot a server once it BSOD. In the last century or so, there have been these little things called remote cards, or out-of-band management cards, or ILO (HP) or RSA (IBM) or whatever. You can do all kinds of magic with them cards, like remote reboots, connecting remotely to the servers mouse/keyboard/screen, hardware diagnostics, turning on the little light on the server so you can find it once you get to the data room.... Makes me wonder about the median slashdot user's IT background ...

Re:Wait what?

[afidel]

Yeah except a lot of those engineers are going to be developing the hypervisor for the next generation of Windows Server. Of course then you just use iLo/DRAC/ASM to remote in or use an IP KVM and a port addressable PDU to power cycle the hardware. Heck I'm the guy responsible for the datacenter at my employer and I rarely go into it, it's too noisy and either too hot or too cold depending on which side of the aisle you're on. My DR equipment is colo'd with AT&T several states away and we've needed remote hands once since we moved 6+ months ago and that was for an old IBM server without ASM.

Re:Cheap remote hardware management

[FaxeTheCat]

In our company we do all that on our HP servers. Including AD authentication to the iLO interfaces... well you may not find it cheap, but it is worth every $$$ (especially when you are in Norway and the server is in Nigeria...)

Re:lol. Win, RDC needs more bandwidth than ssh

[amliebsch]

Of course you can. Remote management consoles have been around since NT4, and WMI [wikipedia.org] has been standard since Windows 2000. You still may need remote desktop access for GUI applications though.

Re:What could POSSIBLY go wrong?

[argent]

Remote controlled power strips, remote consoles (like RealWeasel [realweasel.com] or HP iLO), and so on mean remote PC management is almost as convenient as remote server management. It's not serial consoles, but it's workable.