Remote power and console management in large datacenters

Today’s datacenters are often built of a large number of commodity hardware components. A number of common tasks including operating system installation, hardware and OS–level troubleshooting require low-level control of the machines’ console and power buttons, yet local physical access is not only impractical and error–prone but often impossible. We report on the approach used at CERN for low—level remote management of more than 9000 machines in multiple datacenters.