On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Jamie Bowden <jamie@photon.com> wrote:
From: Saku Ytti [mailto:saku@ytti.fi] Considering that Dell and HP at least are shipping brand new hardware with IPMI/BMC/iLO/whatever management ports that can only speak 100mbit when every other Ethernet interface in the box at least gigabit, having a useful way to talk to that port without having to keep separate switching hardware around would be nice. I'm not holding my breath, but you know, along with a pony, this would be nice.
Eh? That may have been the case a few years ago, but HP ILO4 and iDRAC7 specifically list 10/100/1000 even when using in dedicated port mode. And even in prior versions, you could have the port linking up at 1Gbps, by operating the management in Shared port mode (Sharing the management with the server's Eth0). I expect over time: support for linking up at 10/100 will get rarer and much more expensive. The niche status a 10/100 media converter as an SFP would have if produced is likely to mean it would retail at $2000+ per port device. It probably just makes more sense to go find an old obsolete top of rack switch, like a Cat3750 to get the small fraction of legacy copper ports required for out of band network and server management, which: by the way, should be part of a separate switching infrastructure anyways, to increase the chance it stays operational and useful for troubleshooting, in the event the production network experiences outage or has other issues requiring diagnosis.
Jamie
-- -JH