Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches?

bp2008

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I've been looking for something like this for a while, and yesterday I discovered tons of used enterprise-grade KVM-over-IP switches and related gear for sale relatively cheap on ebay. Most of it is used Avocent hardware that is 10 years old, give or take. I do not know much about it since I had not heard of this brand before yesterday. Does anyone here have experience with this brand?

After a little research I settled on an Avocent DSR1031 switch, which has 8 KVM ports and may be a bit newer than most of the 4 and 16 port models in the same price range. It is still ancient compared to all my other computers and related gear, but I could find nothing newer for anywhere near the same price. I skipped the cheapest listings that were in all-caps, screaming at me that they did nothing more than a basic power-on test, and bought a $140 listing that gave me more confidence. I also found a bundle of 7 compatible USB/VGA adapters for another $140. Lastly, I ran out of web power switch ports in my 'server room' a while ago so I threw in another one of those, also for $140. All together this should give me remote access to the keyboard/mouse/monitor of up to 7 computers. I have 4 computers I'd like to hook up to it already, so if it works as advertised it will be money well spent.

I'll report back in a week or two when this stuff all arrives, but in the meantime I am curious if anyone else around here has experience with it.
 

harrijs

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Re: Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches

We use Avocent in our data centers for KVM. We are not using the DSR line, instead we have the MPU-2032s installed throughout our racks. We use DSView as the central point of management for all of the MPUs. It works well for our needs.

If this is for personal use, I would be more concerned with reducing my power consumption if you have 4 dedicated machines running all the time.

One thing to think about would be to spend some of that money on dedicated hardware for virtualization. With a single or a pair of low powered Atom Avoton servers you could be running a decent ESXi cluster that would allow you to run virtual instances of many more than 7 machines. You could always include some type of KVM for the physical Avoton servers, but the ones that I have actually include a dedicated IPMI port, which is IP KVM right on the motherboard.

I know that I reduced my old virtualization servers power consumption from around 600w down to 90w by upgrading to the newer server architecture. This also allowed me to increase the RAM density which means more VMs. Realistically for $420 you could have purchased a single server and made a pretty powerful VM host that I bet you could consolidate the 7 physical machines into.
 

bp2008

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Re: Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches

Nice. If I recall that is the intended replacement for the DSR line (which has been mostly discontinued I think). But they are too new to find cheap used. Unless I just looked for the wrong things. Anyway, I'm glad to hear it works well.

I think virtualization would actually be a poor fit for my needs.

I have one Intel Celeron NUC running about a half dozen low-demand services like an NTP server. I have no reason to split each little service into its own operating system, as that would only increase the CPU, memory, and maintenance overhead.

One is the Blue Iris machine with an i7-3770k. It doesn't leave enough CPU time left over for anything that I couldn't just run on the NUC. Even if I could buy a CPU twice as fast, I would still use that up with Blue Iris by increasing the frame rates. So one way or another I figure it is best for that box to be standalone.

Another is my FreeNAS box. It uses tons of memory, takes up all the drive bays, and can use significant CPU time when it is working on something, like video transcoding in Plex or processing a backup in Crashplan.

The last one is my Gigabyte Brix Pro GB-BXi7-4770R, which honestly was a waste of money. It is about the size of a NUC but it has a high end i7 chip in it, a bit faster even than my primary Blue Iris machine. But if you put any significant load on it, the damn thing gets very noisy and very hot, so I only give it a light constant load and let it run my camera proxy software which only has a high CPU demand when it is actively being used. Even so, it has killed one hard drive and one stick of ram and it Blue Screens occasionally, probably all caused by the heat.

So I think if I wanted to build one VM host machine, it would have to be some dual-CPU, > 32 GB ECC RAM monstrosity that cost more than all the other systems put together. And I wouldn't be able to cheaply upgrade just the Blue Iris portion when significantly faster CPUs come out.
 

bp2008

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Re: Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches

Mostly I wanted the IP KVM because my always-on systems aren't always reliable :) I can work around most issues just with a reboot from the web power switch but sometimes they will demand keyboard input before they will boot. And it is always nice to know why a remote system is inaccessible before I kill its power. The KVM switch should solve those problems.
 

harrijs

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Re: Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches

You might be surprised with these Avoton processors, they have 8 cores. These aren't the old Atom processors that you used to see in OEM low power PCs. I have a zoneminder installation, a tvheadend installation (coupled with an hdhomerun tuner), and a general services gentoo system (plex, irc, subsonic, syslog server, ntp server) running on this system and you can see they aren't touching the available processor. These are all running inside 8GB of non-ECC RAM (this particular server board is made for non-ECC use) in a single DIMM. The board supports 64GB, but I don't think the CPU would support more than 32GB worth of OS. I am currently building a new machine that is going to run GNS3 as a server so I can work on network topology testing. That server won't take up much CPU, but it will eat the RAM while virtualizing the Cisco IOS and ASA images.



I also have a NAS that I built using openmediavault instead of freenas. The processing requirements are much nicer than freenas (which I ran on a power hungry machine for a couple years). The openmediavault system is running a celeron J1900 processor with 4GB RAM and has ~5TB usable storage in a number of configurations across 7 drives. Both of these systems consume ~90w running combined.



The NAS is offering 2TB for media in a RAID5, 2TB single platter as an NFS mount point for zoneminder as my NVR, and 1TB as a iscsi mount point for vm filesystems in a RAID0.



I know BI is a power hungry beast and probably won't work without the dedicated hardware, but the other machines could be consolidated.

Zoneminder:





Plex, Subsonic, IRC, syslog (Currently playing subsonic for two users as well as compiling ffmpeg from source):

 

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bp2008

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Re: Anyone have experience with Avocent gear, specifically DSR series IP KVM switches

I considered building my FreeNAS on one of those 8 core Atom CPUs, after noting that the pre-built FreeNAS appliances use them. But then I found that Lenovo ThinkServer TS140 with a more powerful Xeon inside is significantly cheaper on Amazon.com. So cheap in fact that I can't put together a comparable server myself without spending more. So I went with that. If I had put more RAM in there, I certainly could have used it as a VM server and eliminated the other two machines. Maybe I will next time, though in all honesty probably not.

I like running multiple computers for redundancy. When one has a hardware failure and dies, the others keep working. They can back up files to each other, too. Though I have to admit it would be cheaper and less maintenance overall to build one good machine and use it for everything, and simply rely on online backups more.

Funny story, the server provider my company uses wants us to 'upgrade' to a virtualized server environment. Yet when you look at the details, what you end up with is less redundancy, less overall CPU power, less overall memory, and a larger monthly bill compared to the traditional build with dedicated servers running just one OS each.
 
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