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I need a method of setting over a thousand Ilo's on our HP DL360p Gen 8 servers (With hundreds more on the way!)

Our environment doesn't allow for the use of any automatically assigned address such as DHCP, so we are unable to push these changes via the network.

Attaching a crash cart to every device, rebooting them one at a time, and entering the information is the only way our technicians have apparently been accomplishing this. We however lost our technicians and now its up to the engineers to take up the rack/stack/setup duties

The devices are all virgin devices, with factory settings. I was hoping there would be a way to push these settings via PuTTY one at a time, or use another tool. We can directly connect to the physical devices. Ideally, I would like to feed a .csv file with server IP/Gateway/Subnet/Username/Password/Permissions combinations to these machines as quickly as possible. I'm almost done whipping up a program to scrape this information from our databases and format it neatly.

If at all possible, it would be best to have a passwordless access, getting the information from the front of these devices before heading around would be a nightmare.

Any chance a generous soul has a solution to this problem, or am I bound to sweat it out in our hot isles?

Thank you! Doc

EDIT: I dont have the rep to post a comment on my question? ewwhite - Yes the restrictions are real. It isn't unusual to see 1,000 HPs added either (With thousands in a warehouse not pre-configured)- this is just this week. We don't have the rack/stack warriors around to do the work. It wouldn't be bad if we could just attach a crossover or cat6 cable from the laptop to the ILO port and push something from a .csv or an XML file. The time it takes for the device to reboot is the real killer here, its going to take over 50 man-hours to set this weeks ILO's if were typing it all in manually and somehow are the fastest folks on the planet, and that's almost all waiting to be able to hit F8

The reason there is no DHCP is too ridiculous to talk about right now, but I will tell you a good story later that makes you think twice about FE's

You'r a subject matter expert, any other crazy ideas ewwhite? Anybody else ever gone though this nonsense?

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  • Yes, I've gone through this nonsense... and have used all of the options I listed in my answer below at various points in time.
    – ewwhite
    Nov 2, 2014 at 12:58

1 Answer 1

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  • You could PXEboot or USB boot the systems into a thin linux image and use the hponcfg utility to set the ILO devices via XML config file.
  • You could ask HP or your vendor to preset the ILOs. I offer that service to clients.
  • Hire/contract a datacenter technician.
  • If your systems are co-located, use Smart Hands services.
  • You could enable DHCP (limit to a list of MAC addresses, or to your dedicated management network).
  • Buy a laptop USB crash cart and set the ILO manually as the systems are being racked.
  • You could use the embedded Intelligent Provisioning feature of Gen8 servers to copy/preload system settings.
  • Experiment with the HP Scripting Toolkit for your deployments.

You're going to need some way to update firmware, set BIOS config and prepare these systems anyway... E.g. How will you set the Smart Array RAID controller configuration? If you're not doing this already, you're going to have problems with these servers!

Edit: When I encounter companies that have no DHCP facilities, I do wonder what's going on. Provisioning and builds become infinitely more difficult.

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  • I appreciate the ideas!
    – TheDoc
    Nov 2, 2014 at 10:51
  • I appreciate the ideas! Due to things out of my control we can not load any image onto the devices, have HP preset out ILOs, hire additional contractors, enable DHCP at all. These systems contain no OS, we load everything remotely, but were doing tech work now. We have crash carts of almost every possible configuration - and that's what its looking like is going to have to be done. The issue were having is the client is too stubborn to allow DHCP so we have to physically attach the keyboard/mouse to the device, reboot the device, boot into the ILO (3-5 minutes wasted) and risk making mistakes
    – TheDoc
    Nov 2, 2014 at 11:05
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    Run. Run as fast as you can :) Nov 2, 2014 at 11:09
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    @TheDoc I hope you're being compensated well. Those restrictions; artificial or not, prevent your team from doing a good job with the HP servers. Several people here on ServerFault, including me, have each managed environments with thousands of HP servers. These are your real options for ILO deployment. I would try to do a better job selling the client on the merits of allowing your team the access you require.
    – ewwhite
    Nov 2, 2014 at 11:13

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