Proliant

Some weeks ago, HP has published an updated version of their HP Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP). The SPP 2015.04.0 has added support for

• new HP ProLiant servers and options,
• support for Red Had Enterprise Linux 6.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12, VMware vSphere 5.5 U2 and (of course) VMware vSphere 6.0,
• HP Smart Update Manager v7.2.0 was added,
• the HP USB Key Utility for Windows v2.0.0.0 can now handle downloads greater than 4GB (important, because this release may not fit on a standard DVD media…)
• select Linux firmware components is now available in rpm format

In addition, the SPP covers two important customer advisories:

I’m a bit late, but HP released a new version of their HP Service Pack for ProLiant in June 2014. This version of the SPP supersedes the version 2014.02.0(B). This release adds support for HPs new 20 GbE adapter

• HP FlexFabric 20Gb 2-port 630FLB Adapter
• HP FlexFabric 20Gb 2-port 630M Adapter

and contains new firmware (v4.20b) for HP BladeSystem c-Class Virtual Connect, 4/8Gb 20-port and 8Gb 24-port FC components. HP also added the following firmware and software components to this release:

Some weeks ago, Frank Denneman wrote a short blog post about accessing his Supermicro IPMI with SSH. He used this access to power on his lab servers.I don’t use Supermicro boards in my lab, but I have four HP ProLiants with iLO and iLO has a also a SSH interface. This way to power on my servers seemed very practical, especially because the iLO web interface isn’t the fastest. But I wanted it a bit more automated, so I decided to use Plink to send commands via SSH.

When you access the HP iLO webinterface, you will be redirected to a HTTPS website. This connection is usually secured by a self-signed SSL certificate. To replace this certificate with a certificate that was issued by your own CA, you have to complete several steps. I will guide you to the steps. I focused on HP ilO 2, but the steps are similar for iLO 3 or iLO 4.

The requirements

We need:

I faced today a really nasty problem. I have four HP ProLiant DL360 G6 in my lab. This server type has two 1 GbE NICs with the Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 chip onboard, which are usually claimed by the bnx2 driver. While applying a host profile to three of the hosts, one hosts reported an error. Supposedly the host hasn’t a vmnic0 and because of this the host profile couldn’t be applied. Okay, quick check in the vSphere Web Client: Only three NICs. C# client showed the same result. Now it was interesting: