Remote virtual media

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Remote virtual media is a method of connecting a remote media source (i.e. CD-ROM drive, hard disk drive, floppy disk drive, or virtual implementation of any of them) to a local system. The local system then has access to the remote (and possibly virtual) media and can potentially read from and write to that media as if it were physical and local. Some examples of remote media would be where a physical disk drive of any type is made available remotely for use by a local computer. If the remote media were also virtual then it might be implemented as a file which is served sector by sector over a communications link such as Ethernet to the local system.

Remote virtual media is a very useful tool for those who need to manage large numbers of computers such as commercial IT data center managers. A local computer can be made to boot to one of many virtual disks that can perform any variety of tasks such as virus scans of the local physical drive and patch management or even complete installation of the local operating system. Remote media and remote virtual media are becoming common features for standards based server platform management subsystems such as those which support the OPMA interface.