Im preparing to purchase a slew of servers from a vendor that touts 'IPMI 2.0' on the main board. I haven't bought any hardware in some time and I'm coming from a Dell/DRAC world where I need a KVM switch to do local logins.
Does IPMI give me this? I read conflicting answers where 'sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't'. And if it does, do I need a monitor/keyboard/touch pad combo on site to get a shell for a given server? Or can I bring a laptop with me and somehow get shell access?
What seems to be consistent among the various sources is that IPMI lets me reboot, do some BIOS work and even touch HW RAID controllers. This is great and if it will save me the $5K or so for the additional KVM parts it's even better. I'm just not clear on how.