Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Change ILO settings via CLI from Linux

ILO - aka "Integrated Lights Out" is an advanced console technology that HP has implemented in most of their servers, it includes dozens of cool features and allows total remote control on the server in all kinds of aspects. ILO includes lot's of advanced configurations such as IP configuration, DNS, SNMP, LDAP integration, Users, Permissions and many more.

The "traditional" way to change these settings is via server downtime and booting it to ILO BIOS (usually by pressing F8 at boot time) and changing it there.

But what if we have hundreds of servers that require immediate change, going the first way would be a huge waste of time, therefore HP introduced a cool scripting tool (for both Linux & Windows) called  - "hponcfg". In this short tutorial we will understand how to use it - read on:


To use "hpconfg" we first have to make sure a service called "hprsm" is installed properly & running and that the needed modules are loaded into kernel:

linux01 #rpm -q hprsm hponcfg
hprsm-7.9.0-108.sles10
hponcfg-1.6.0-1

linux01 #/etc/init.d/hprsm start

The service is running and we are ready to configure our ILO settings, to see the current settings we can generate an XML template with our current settings, to achieve this execute:

linux01 #hponcfg -w /tmp/ilo_cfg_`uname -n`.xml
Firmware Revision = 1.81 Device type = iLO 2 Driver name = cpqci
RILOE II/iLO configuration successfully written to file "/tmp/ilo_config_linux01.xml"


Now, we can see our current ILO configuration represented in the XML template we saved to /tmp, let's see what it contains:

linux01 #cat /tmp/ilo_config_linux01.xml



















Ok, now you can edit whatever parameter you like and upload the updated XML template to ILO via "hpocnfg tool".

To upload the XML template, execute:
linux01 #hponcfg -f /tmp/ilo_config_`uname -n`.xml

Please note that  restart of ILO is needed for changes to take effect.