How do you name your servers?

stacksofplates

All of my desktops/laptops are transformer names. My desktop is Megatron, my laptop is Ironhide, and my other laptop is Bonecrusher.

Servers are just what their purpose is and if there is more than one, I just add a number after. So ZeroTier, Drupal, FreePBX, etc.

nadnerB

At home my computers use Star Wars planets as names.

At work... spoilers

Carnival Boy

I used to give them girl's names but now I just name them after their role, plus a number.
So
SQL01, SQL02, EXCH01, ESXCH02, DC01, DC02, FILESERV01, SHAREPT01 etc etc

In the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.

aaron-closed account

This post is deleted!

JaredBusch

@aaron said:

class of server-location id-incrementing number

Cute names become counter productive with more than a handful.

I once named everything on a network after characters from The 5th Element.

Everything is named based on client - purpose - sequence

Example: ntgdc01

scottalanmiller

@Carnival-Boy said:

I used to give them girl's names but now I just name them after their role, plus a number.
So
SQL01, SQL02, EXCH01, ESXCH02, DC01, DC02, FILESERV01, SHAREPT01 etc etc

In the age of virualisation and rapid deployment of new servers, this seems to be only practical approach in my opinion.

Yeah, I agree. When you had physical servers that lasted a decade and only a few of them saying "Betty is down", or "The Enterprise has been infected with malware" or "Vienna is running slow today" was effective because we treated each one like a person and everyone dealt with just a few of them. It made sense in smaller environments. I still remember the roles of our two biggest Windows NT 4 boxes from the 1990s. They each made it ten years and were named Vienna and Salzburg. I can still tell you the memory configs on them, what apps they ran, their RAID configs, their processors, and their full histories. There were our babies, so naming them as such made sense.

But now that we create and destroy VMs every day and have tons and tons more of them that would just not work like it used to. It used to take months or years to decommission a physical box. Now we turn off a VM in seconds.