Once upon what's now a long while ago, we had a bunch of SunFire X2100 and X2200 1U servers (for example, they were used in our first generation ZFS fileserver ). One of the reasons that I loved these servers back in the days was that for free, they came with a full IPMI / BMC setup that supported both KVM over IP and virtual media. I installed any number of servers this way from the comfort of my office, using the KVM over IP as if I was at the console (because I effectively was) and the IPMI virtual media to feed a local ISO image to the server I was installing. In time those servers went the way of all servers (which is to say, into the e-waste dumpster, although it took a while ) and none of our later servers gave me that '(re)install from the office' experience with their limited BMCs. For years, we lived with doing in person physical installs and reinstalls of our servers (well, I lived with that, my co-workers don't care as much).

Recently we wound up with a bunch of servers in another building and a need to reinstall them all with Ubuntu 26.04. This pushed me into learning about UEFI network boot , working out how to network boot our customized Ubuntu ISO image , and then the realization that if we were reinstalling an existing, running server we could use a somewhat simpler kexec-based method . This has given us a reinstall experience (and sometimes an install experience) that looks a fair bit like the SunFire X2100 BMC based experience, and can be done from comfort of our office (instead of a noisy machine room a block or two away). My co-workers like it enough that we're talking about using our new network reinstall system even for servers in our main machine room .

On the one hand, it's nice that we can now have this experience with basically any system (it's nicer if it supports network booting, but reinstalls work without that). On the other hand, the experience is a lot more fragile than the BMC-based experience. Our network installs only works because the Ubuntu server installer supports access over SSH, it requires either a running system on the server or a whole collection of network booting infrastructure (including that it be enabled on the server). If the installer blows up ( as it does too often in 26.04 ), you can't necessarily get access to the system or force a power cycle, and you may be stuck needing to go visit the server in person.

(The most practical version of the network install experience also relies on the server having enough RAM to download the ISO image. This seems to require 8 GB of RAM in common situations in my testing, which is far more than our SunFire X2100s normally had.)

This change from hardware support on limited machines to general software that more or less replicates the earlier experience (but imperfectly) feels like a pattern that's happened repeatedly. One advantage of the software version is that it generalizes, for example to virtual machines.

(Virtual machines can have a BMC-like experience, but it's all with a bespoke environment that's specific to that VM system. Network installs are generic across physical servers, virtual machines, and so on.)

PS: Of course the SunFire BMC used a Java applet, which was somewhat painful ( cf ). Modern BMCs thankfully use straightforward web stuff.