This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series HPE InfoSight for Servers - Setup Guide

This is my first post of the new year and it’s been a while. I’ve been a little busy this year. I’ll do better! Anyway on to the fun part. Since it’s the new year I figured I should invest some time implementing one of the most important features available to anyone with Gen8, Gen9 or Gen10 HPE Servers. It’s called HPE InfoSight for Servers and it’s kind of a big deal. You might have heard of InfoSight already if you’ve ever been exposed to Nimble Storage Arrays. More on that in a bit.

HPE continues to extend the power of InfoSight across the products in their portfolio and in January 2019 they released HPE InfoSight for Servers. They even made it basically free and supportable on legacy servers back to Gen8 as long as they have iLO4 or iLO5. I’ve finally gotten some time to play with it in my lab and here we are. Let’s dig into why you want this and learn more about Infosight in this two part article series!

What’s InfoSight?

For the uninitiated, HPE bought Nimble Storage a couple years ago. They did so for many reasons but the biggest one was for InfoSight. InfoSight is a cloud based analytics platform using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to leverage your datacenters analytics to predict and prevent problems across your full stack infrastructure. It can even ingest performance and configuration data from your VMware virtual infrastructure down to the VM and even VMDK level using the Cross-Stack Analytics engine. Honestly that’s just the tip of the iceberg though. I won’t spend a ton of time talking through the details here but I highly recommend you check out this link and get to learning.

I mentioned that HPE has extended InfoSight across other products in their portfolio. Currently that contains nearly all the HPE Storage products including Nimble Storage, 3PAR, Primera, dHCI and Simplivity as well as the HPE Server platforms on ProLiant DL, ProLiant ML, ProLiant BL, Apollo and Synergy. The below image shows the products that are supported by InfoSight today.

If you take a step back and look at the big picture, HPE is going to leverage InfoSight across every piece of hardware in your infrastructure. With all this data InfoSight will be able to find, predict, prevent and correlate problems across multiple components including servers, storage, networking and even applications eventually. It’s an incredibly powerful story. So let’s look at what this means for HPE Servers.

What’s InfoSight for Servers?

HPE InfoSight for Servers can be implemented on nearly any HPE Gen8, Gen9 or Gen10 Server with an iLO4 or iLO5 interface. No support contract is needed and the appliance to manage the connection to InfoSight, HPE iLO Amplifier Pack, is free. Now you’ll get way more benefit from it if you do have a support contract on the server of course since InfoSight ties into support. Let’s look at a few things InfoSight for Servers has available today.

Server Wellness Dashboard
Global inventory of servers
Global server warranty reports
Data analytics for server security
Predictive data analytics for parts failure
Email notification of alerts
Alert Management (acknowledge, filter, search)
Manual case creation
Automatic collection of server telemetry and sensor data
HPE Support access to all AHS (Active Health System) files

This by itself is a pretty good list of functionality but there’s way more coming. Currently being developed are automated case creation, firmware and driver update notifications and recommendations, server misconfiguration checks and much more. Let’s take a look at how all this works.

HPE InfoSight analyzes the data from the Active Health System Viewer (AHSV) on your server that has been collected by the Integrated Lights-Out (iLO) management interface.That all happens through a few different pieces working in concert. First your servers iLO interface collects the data from the AHS. That AHS data and iLO data is collected from the iLO interface of your servers by the iLO Amplifier appliance. The iLO Amplifier then sends your data up to InfoSight.

For more information on HPE InfoSight for servers go here or here. So all this sounds awesome, but how do we make it work? Well that’s what we’re here for. Let’s go over the prerequisites and see what it takes to get HPE InfoSight for Servers implemented.

HPE InfoSight for Servers – Prerequisites

It doesn’t take much to get it working but there are a few things you have to do and my goal here is to make this easy and successful. I’ve heard of a few customers having trouble or running into issues and I actually had a minor issue while setting it up that I’ll cover later. Hopefully by following this guide all the problems can be avoided. So what do we need to make it work?

A Gen8, Gen9 or Gen10 HPE Server with an iLO4 or iLO5 interface.
iLO must be configured with an IP address and credentials. The iLO web interface must be accessible on your network.
A virtual host to run the iLO Amplifier Pack (VMware ESXi, Windows Hyper-V and Linux KVM are supported).
An HPE InfoSight account, get one free and go sign up at https://infosight.hpe.com.

If you’ve got those checked off that’s all you need except for a bit of time. Depending on how accessible your environment is, it may take more or less time. There may also be a few reboots of iLO and possibly the servers themselves. Your mileage may vary but if you follow the steps I outline here it should be a breeze. Let’s get started!

Step 1: Update iLO firmware on your server(s)

I generally recommend all firmware on your servers should be up to date. Within the context of this article though the only firmware we need right now is the iLO firmware. For servers with iLO4 interfaces HPE recommends iLO firmware version 2.70 or above. For servers with iLO5 interfaces HPE recommends iLO firmware version 1.40 or above. iLO4 firmware versions do not work on iLO5 interfaces and vice versa. Open up your trusted web browser and go to https://support.hpe.com.

In the search box type in the model of server you have. I typed the full server model here as HPE ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Server since that’s what I have in my lab.

If you’re specific enough you should see your exact server model appear at the top of the results. Click on the server model link and it should take you to the Drivers & Firmware section.

Now this is where it could get confusing. There are several different iLO Firmware packages and there are many different ways to upgrade the iLO firmware. I’m showing you what I think is by far the simplest way that doesn’t require outside components. With this method we can update the iLO firmware from within the iLO web interface. We want to use the Online ROM Flash Component for Windows x64 – HPE Integrated Lights-Out 4 in this case. Once you find the correct firmware update package of the latest available version click the Title.

On the firmware page you’ll notice it may not even list the OS or Hypervisor running on your server. That’s ok! We want the Windows x64 package because it contains the bin file we need to upgrade through the iLO web interface. Click Download to get the iLO firmware update package. Once downloaded we need to double click the executable and then click the Extract button. Extract the firmware components into a folder. Now that you’ve got everything extracted take a look at the components and find the .bin file. In this case ilo4_270.bin is the file we need. Note the folder location.Next we’re going to open a browser and navigate to the iLO web interface and go ahead and login. Note the current Firmware Version displayed. After you get logged into the iLO web interface check the System Health to make sure you don’t have any major issues to address. In my case the System Health shows degraded but it’s because I only have one power supply connected currently so I can move ahead. Look all the way at the bottom of the left hand menu and click Administration. The Administration menu will expand and then click the Firmware option. Here we can upgrade several different firmware components but again we’ll only be upgrading the iLO firmware. Towards the bottom in the middle click Choose File.In the dialog select the .bin file we noted eariler and click Open then click the Upload button which will start the firmware update.The dialog here tells us the iLO firmware update will cause iLO to reboot. No big deal since the server itself will remain online and available. Click OK to continue. The next step breaks down into three small parts. First it uploads the firmware to iLO. It checks the validity of the firmware update package. Finally it flashes the iLO firmware. When finished it will reboot the iLO and you will get kicked out of the iLO web interface. Wait a few minutes and then refresh the web browser. The iLO login page should show up listing the new version like the below image.So that’s it for upgrading the firmware. Now just rinse and repeat for all your compatible servers. This of course may take some additional time depending on the size of your environment.

Step 2: iLO Amplifier Pack Deployment

Now that the servers are ready to go we can work on getting the iLO Amplifier Pack setup. The iLO Amplifier Pack is much more than just the way to connect servers to InfoSight. It can do a lot more. Go skim through the iLO Amplifier Pack User Guide and check it out. Did I mention it’s also completely free? Now that you know what it is and what it does let’s open a web browser and go to https://iloamplifierpack.itcs.hpe.com. Fill in your information and make sure you use a good email address then click Register.

You should receive an email shortly thereafter with all the download instructions and the appliance Activation Key. Make sure to keep the email and key handy for later. At this point you have a few options. The iLO Amplifier Pack supports VMware ESXi, Windows Hyper-V and Linux KVM. For this article I’m only covering the VMware ESXi based deployment method because that’s what’s in my lab. Click Download Software to get the appliance for your environment. In my case it downloaded a zip file and I extracted the contents to a folder. It contains a readme document and the OVF file for the appliance. Take some time and read the README document. It goes into a little more detail on specific requirements and known issues than I do in this article.I’m going to assume you know how to log into vCenter here. I’m logged into my vSphere 6.7U3 environment below. When ready right-click on the cluster and click Deploy OVF Template.Here we select Local file and click the Choose Files button to navigate to where the zip file was extracted to and select the OVF file. Click Next to continue. Next we must name the appliance and select the vSphere datacenter that it lives in. I named the appliance according to my lab naming scheme and selected my lab Datacenter. Click Next again to continue.Select the Cluster as the compute resource and click Next again. Here we must verify the correct OVF template was selected and click Next. For my purposes I chose Thin Provision on the Select virtual disk format. Then picked a datastore for the appliance to be deployed to and click Next. On this version of the appliance there are two networks listed. I pick my Server VLAN for both. There is the option to have multiple NIC’s later in the setup process but you only have to use one. Click Next.Finally we validate all the settings and locations and click Finish to start the appliance deployment. The appliance deployment doesn’t take very long and once complete you will have to Power On the iLO Amplifier appliance.Easy enough so far right? That’s it for Part 1! Make sure you come back and check out Part 2 and we’ll finish getting the appliance up and running and see how HPE InfoSight for Servers works. Thanks for reading!