Virtual KVM Hardware?

[patrickbores]

I was at my company's brand new datacenter today, bringing our servers up online. One of the servers was beeping on startup and not responding to pings after several minutes. When I looked around for a monitor/keyboard/mouse, there was none.

It occurred to me that it would be awfully convenient if I could have a "virtual" KVM on my laptop, with complementary hardware. What I'm thinking of is a VGA to USB converter, and software to handle the display. Then a USB to USB cable to send keyboard and mouse events to the box. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this, or am I just mad?

Patrick
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P.S. - this is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.