Considerations for choosing HP Agentless Management

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• The capability for the iLO 4 to behave as a “Network Management Stack” firewall between network management
protocol requests and the host-based applications/data stores. The exception here occurs when you use the SNMP
pass-thru option. Client SNMP requests sent to iLO over the network pass to the host OS. The responses then pass to
iLO and return to the client over the network. Alerts are not affected.
The iLO Management Engine includes monitoring, diagnostic, and support capabilities. The Agentless Management
incorporated with iLO 4 performs the monitoring role. Figure 1 shows that iLO has access to all of the hardware sensors
including temperature, fan, and power sensors. In addition, many HP adapters, including the HP Smart Array storage
controller, can also communicate status to iLO. iLO reports status on all internally attached Smart Array managed disk
drives.
Figure 1: The iLO Management Engine includes the core instrumentation logic to monitor hardware and the embedded Agentless
Management with its SNMP stack
It’s your choice. You can use either Agentless Management or existing HP Insight Management agents. The default iLO
configuration uses Agentless Management without any agent software running on the OS. Agentless Management,
health monitoring, and alerting begin working the moment you supply power to the server. Agentless Management runs
on the iLO hardware, independent of the host OS and processor.
With installation of the optional Agentless Management Service (AMS), Agentless Management can also retrieve specific
host information such as OS name, OS version, and installed HP software versions.
Agentless Management with AMS
You install the optional AMS to collect additional OS data outside the scope of iLO 4 monitoring. As shown in Figure 1, the
AMS functions under the host OS. AMS does not require any additional system management protocol installation on the
host OS. Instead, the application communicates directly to the iLO 4 firmware using the existing architecture of the
proven HP iLO Channel Interface, the “iLO Driver” in Figure 1. This interface uses industry standard PCIe memory transfer
similar to storage and network devices. In Linux systems, the HP iLO Driver is maintained upstream in the Linux kernel
source tree.