[justsomeadvice0]

To my knowledge all modern DCs have out-of-band networks for this sort of thing that provide serial access to the BMC chip, nothing old school about that. Old school is having to submit a ticket to Jerry in the DC to walk the crash cart down to box 55AE, hook up a serial console, run diagnostics, and attach the output back to the ticket. You only have to deal with Jerry occasionally now, usually when the BMC or power rails fail.

[walrus01]

There's more than a few people who've decided the security risk of full console capable bmc is not acceptable - and if other fail over systems are engineered appropriately, not necessary at all. BMC/IPMI intentionally disabled/not connected to any network.

Anecdotally I have seen a number of low cost x86-64 pseudo blade setups similar to open compute platform design stuff which have no oob. If a unit fails it's pulled entirely and put in a work queue for someone to repair.

[ilyt]

In both cases it's disruptive event as you have to reboot the machine to get into rescue mode (as you don't need the password)