I have a question about server clustering and a control panel to manage it.

I am building a piece of software that manages a server, however it looks like now it needs to be able manage multiple servers. So now it's not modifying just one server, but many. So how would I go about with that?

How does commercial control panel handles managing multiple server with just one installation instance of the control panel?

Well, ssh tunnels could be used. Or, a DB, and then scheduled scripts from the servers access the DB and do the tasks specified.

The way we are doing (h-sphere):

We setup ssh connection pool to the other servers, and trigger scripts (shell/perl) from that pool.

If you just open new connection for each request/script - there is a posibility of "ssh storms", where you will have ~50 connections at the same time - and it looks like system doesn't really likes it.

For windows we use http or https (depending on the settings) to communicate with the client server. We triger asp scripts on the other end.