Finding Your Servers With Solaris

from: Marc Hamilton's weblog

If you are an average CIO, you probably follow one of several ways to find out how many servers you have in your datacenter and on your network.

You ask your outsourced service partner, who by the way probably charges you on a per server basis, to tell you how many servers they are managing for you. Hum, what sounds funny about that?

You ask your sys-admin to run her home grown scripts that were written 5 years ago

You ask your admin to walk around and count (as in with pencil and paper)

You buy some expensive inventory management software and load it on every server

There are actually some pretty good solutions for the latter, until you think about how many servers on your network actually run the same OS as when they were purchased and first installed. Did someone walk out with the server in building 2a last night or did one of your developers just download the latest Solaris OS and wipe out your fancy inventory management software by mistake? Well, Sun is about to change all that with a new technology we call service tags. Steve Wilson, who runs the Sun Connection software team, explains the details of

Service Tags in his blog. But the concept works like this:

Using technologies and protocols such as SLP (RFC 2608), ZeroConf and XML, every server running Solaris, be it a Sun server or one from another vendor, will soon include service tags. Currently there are 881 systems from virtually every major vendor, including Sun, Dell, HP, and IBM on the
Solaris Hardware Compatibility List. In the next month you will be able to download service tags as an add-on package for Solaris and they will come standard in the next release.
If you have a Sun x64 server with ILOM (Integrated Lights Out Management), service tags will be integrated into the ILOM software so you won't even have to have Solaris booted to find your server. Over time, service tags will be built into every piece of Sun hardware and software.
Then, using Sun Connection, you can quickly and easily register the service tags on all your systems. You could even create a
cool map like this that shows where all your servers are.

So what about privacy and security? You can always turn service tags off, but why would you? I guess there are people with General Motors cars that don't enable their OnStar service because of privacy concerns. If you are concerned about what data we collect and how we ensure the security of that data, Steve Wilson's Sun Connection team would be happy to explain it to you.