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nice thing would be is if we had some older out-of-date servers it would 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.