If you remove machines from a self-managed server room - even temporarily - please tell computing support. It helps us to track what's going on, and plan accordingly.
Capacity in the self-managed server rooms is limited, and we monitor the overall usage.
If you remove a machine without telling us, we may reuse the space that was allocated to it.
Occasionally we have to turn off machines at short notice. There are a few reasons why we might need to do this:
Food and drink are not allowed in the School's server rooms.
Access is normally granted freely to those who manage machines in the rooms, but not to anyone else.
Your machine will likely be equipped with a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). This might be called a 'Lights Out Management processor' (LOM) or a 'Dell Remote Access Controller' (DRAC). This allows remote system administration of the machine, a remote console via IPMI, and so on.
There's a dedicated subnet and VLAN for these devices. To use it, please contact support.
Power is distributed by the 'power bars' attached to the rear of each rack, which present as IEC C13 and C19 outlets. Most machines will be connected to C13 outlets on the power bars and, when your machine is installed, the support team will supply the appropriate IEC C14-C13 power cables.
There are four network switches in room B.Z14, and one in room B.01. Each provides 44 1000baseT ('Gigabit ethernet') ports. Ports on each of these switches can be configured onto any of the public or private VLANs available in the building. Each of these five switches has a 10Gbps uplink to the network core.
A port in one of the switches will be configured for your machine on installation. You must not re-patch your machine to any other switch port - they are not interchangeable. Never rearrange, add or remove any network connections.
All machines must be rack-mountable; no desktop-style machines will be accepted.
In order to make the best use of the available space, we aim to rack machines fairly densely - unless there is a good reason not to.
Rack space, power, and available cooling in the self-managed server rooms are all limited. The SRRG (Server Room Resource Group) oversees the allocation of space in all of the School's server rooms. Before you make plans to site equipment in either room, you must submit a Server Room Request Form explaining what equipment you propose to install, how much rack space you'll need, and how much power your equipment can be expected to draw. If the request is reasonable, the SRRG will reserve the space, subject to the School's SMSR space policy.
We’re not planning to refresh Virtual DICE for 2026/27 because of resource constraints.
The 2024/25 version is still available, but its software will be more than a year out of date compared to proper DICE.
If this is a significant problem for you, please let us know.