These motherboards have no BMC, very few USB (2) and NIC
ports (2), one expansion slot, and are headless (no
videochip).The only thing that an administrator can do
remotely is "reboot over LAN".
This is impressive. I assume that all their servers are imaged and provisioned via a system build script. That is no small task to get just right
It's actually not as hard as you might think. It's a lot simpler for Facebook then it would be for most people, as they control their own hardware.
The problem with automated builds comes in when you have lots of different hardware configs, and lots of different software configs. If you just have a few hardware configs, then your task is much, much easier.
