On Monday, December 13, 2010 11:20:20 am Owen DeLong wrote:
WOL is unfortunately terribly deficient in that the spec. never envisioned the possibility of a need for wake on WAN.
Use case I can think of: 'green' data center running VMware VI3 or vSphere with DRS and dynamically bringing blades online through WoL to handle load peaks and still stay green (when a host is empty, using the VMware API you can take it to maintenance mode and shut it down; use WoL to boot it back up when you need it).
Bottom line, it's a non-routeable layer 2 protocol. Your choices boil down to the helper address nightmare you describe or proxy servers on every subnet.
In the use case I mention it wouldn't be a problem, since under VMware DRS (which relies on VMotion) you have to have layer 2 transparency anyway. Would this not be a use case also for something like VPLS or EoMPLS?