Re:An example (Score 1)

What rule about saying the server name over the phone? Have you ever heard of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet. You are already speaking with someone that is not a native speaker to your location in most cases, so you should be spelling out your server name anyway.

Also remember that in the Windows world, NETBIOS names have to be 15 characters or less. Granted, you don't need to be using NETBIOS in your environment, but 15 characters is a lot, and why not offer the ultimate compatability?

Given all of that...I like:

Location (3 digits)
Operational Status (1 digit)
OS (3 digits)
Physical Status (1 digit)
Use (4 digits)
Numeric Counter (3 digits)

Locations would be airport code or similar, Operational status would be Prod, Lab, Staging, etc...abbreviated to one letter. Make a page in your IT Handbook that lists out all of the abbreviations. OS can include Networking OS, Physical Status would be blade, physical, or virtual and abbreviated to one letter. Use can be anything suiting for your environment, and the numeric counter keeps them all unique.

If you are securing your environment well and using good aliasing, the additional "exposure" that listing out all kinds of good information about the server in it's name should be mitigated.

Subdomains are also a great idea.

Whatever method you use, your techs should be able to quickly identify the machine in question. Your users don't care, because they usually connect to an alias anyway that is user friendly.