Wake on LAN in the enterprise

Mon Dec 13 16:39:04 UTC 2010

On Monday, December 13, 2010 11:20:20 am Owen DeLong wrote:
> WOL is unfortunately terribly deficient in that the spec. never envisioned the possibility
> of a need for wake on WAN.

Use case I can think of: 'green' data center running VMware VI3 or vSphere with DRS and dynamically bringing blades online through WoL to handle load peaks and still stay green (when a host is empty, using the VMware API you can take it to maintenance mode and shut it down; use WoL to boot it back up when you need it).

> Bottom line, it's a non-routeable layer 2 protocol. Your choices boil down to the
> helper address nightmare you describe or proxy servers on every subnet.

In the use case I mention it wouldn't be a problem, since under VMware DRS (which relies on VMotion) you have to have layer 2 transparency anyway.  Would this not be a use case also for something like VPLS or EoMPLS?