
Ask HN: Datacenter server discovery - justanotherday
I am looking good solutions on how to discover new servers from different vendors that get racked in the datacenter for 1st time. The current process we use for dell servers is the following.<p>We have a discovery server in the datacenter that has multiple virtual interfaces to different management networks. One of them is on the same network as drac default ip.<p>We do an arp ping to discover all the macs of the different dracs and then connect to each of them and configure the servers to pxe boot. The servers boot a pxe image and record hw config of the server into a database.<p>This allows discovery of new servers and servers that have had their dracs reset to factory defaults when they get moved from one dc to  another.<p>This gets quite complicated over time having to manage all these different virtual interfaces in multiple datacenters. It requires a dedicated discover box that has a cable into the management network making it a single point of failure.<p>How do you discover new servers after they are racked that is efficient, reduced manual entry and allows you to track which rack they are in.<p>If you have an env that discovers servers purely through pxe boot without touching the management interface, how do you account for servers that fail to pxeboot or fails to load your discovery image or some other failure at scale.
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CyberFonic
I have worked in many multi-vendor data centers (not Google scale, just bank,
insurance co size). Admittedly my experience is multi-OS: HPUX, AIX, Solaris +
some Linux.

Compared to the cost of equipment the cost of designing and documenting each
rack, along with IP addresses, SAN and fibre-channel, top of rack switches,
directors, etc, is only a small fraction. We used to bench build each and
every server to design specs and only loaded it into the rack when it was
verified to be correctly configured. Upon first power-up we would verify that
the management consoles could correctly see the servers and all their
configured interfaces, i.e. all NICs and FCAs.

