While WHMCS does in fact allow us to manage the sale and
billing for Dedicated Servers, we do not have the ability to actually
manage them from within our billing platform. This would be ideal for
allowing us to have a single point of access for Client, Tickets, and
Inventory management. Some of the below entries are suggestions for
overall functionality:
Asset tracking / Server inventory
- I keep track of server serial numbers anyways, it would be nice to
keep a table of server details that are linked back to the serial
numbers. The serial number details might have more information on
specs, notes, location (see below), etc. You could see which customers
have had that serial number. It could show if it's currently assigned
to an active customer, terminated, decommissioned, or available. The
nice thing would be is if we had some older out-of-date servers it would
be a nice way to allow customers to see inventory and order them at a
discount. Once the order comes in it wouldn't be available and not show
up as orderable.
The accounting ramifications could be nice as well, I'm not an
accountant but I'm sure they'd like to see more details as far as when
it was ordered, PO #, cost, vendor. You could run a report showing
costs and revenues of equipment as well. When equipment is
decommissioned you know you made X amount back on the initial
investment, or how long equipment is lasting.
Who knows, maybe a batch of servers comes in with faulty hardware and
you see a pattern, you could see which customers are on servers from the
same PO # and email them about preventative maintenance.
Location Mapping
-
While it doesn't need to be complex on day 1, it'd be nice to also
group serial numbers by location. room : row : cabinet : U
Then you could drill down to the cabinet and see what is in it. To add
complexity you can see capacity (u) and other infrastructure (switches /
pdu). Keep in mind that the asset tracking knows sold/unsold so you
could pull up a row or cabinet and know what is available
rDNS/IP management
- Keep track of IP management, allow customers to set their own rDNS for IPs assigned to them. (PowerDNS)
Network Control
control / disable / label / switch VLAN on switch ports
- disabling a switch port for a server that is suspended / enable on un-suspension
- relabel / change VLAN on the switch port when assigning it to a server
80 Comments
Login to post a comment.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1217980
http://hostbillapp.com/features/colocation.php
Bandwidth & overage billing
Switch ports control
PDU control & automated PDU reboots
Reverse DNS & IP management