First of all, excuse my non acquaintance in IT, because I'm not an IT person at all.
I just installed a small render farm composed of 16 HP proliant 380 G5 and 10 Bull Novascale R2 (supermicro based motherboard). OS is windows server 2008 R2.
I would like to switch on or shutdown all the servers from another Win7 machine. The win7 machine is now on the same local network, but I'm looking for a solution that can work even outside the local network.
The G5 are provided with Ilo 2 while the bull used supermicro IPMI.
On both brand I can turn on or shutdown the server one per one using a browser interface (tested from local network).
I'm planning to add 10 more server (probably HP because they are very cheap) and I definitively need
to be able to turn on or shutdown all server at once.
I'm pretty sure that lot of professional Admin have been in the same case than myself, so there should be a way to easily pilot several server at once.
Thanks for your help.
Best Answer
Why do you need to power these server all off or on at once? It's actually not a common request or action amongst professional sysadmins.
Either way, you can either use a combination of ILO and IPMI tools: Using the ILO SSH interface for the HP servers and ipmitool for the Supermicro servers.
Or you can just use ipmitool to control both system types.
In addition, both the HP and Supermicro ILO have a command line interface. That may help as well.