Linux Best Management Practices for HP ProLiant Gen8 Servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Technical white paper | Linux Best Management Practices: HP ProLiant Gen8 Servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Because the iLO BMC runs independently of the server processor and OS, you can start monitoring your HP ProLiant Gen8 server’s
core hardware components even before the OS or any OS-based software (a bare metal server) is installed. To monitor a bare-metal HP
ProLiant Gen8 server, you need only power on the server and configure SNMP parameters.
The iLO BMC gathers data about core hardware components (including health, environmental, and other server status information) and
makes the data available through multiple external interfaces including:
• Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)
• HP Remote Insight Board Command Language (RIBCL)
• SNMP
The iLO BMC uses the data that it collects to directly fulfill SNMP requests sent to the iLO 4 IP address. The HP Agentless Management
Service does not require an SNMP stack to run on the host OS and it does not have an external interface.
Because the iLO 4 BMC handles the management functionality, facilities such as HP SIM can discover the IP address of the iLO
management engine and its associated host server without requiring OS-based software. Without iLO 4 and Agentless Management, HP
SIM cannot discover an iLO and associate it with the server until the host-based agents were installed and started.
HP AMS provides to iL04 only that data that is not available to the iLO 4. This includes information about the OS or information that is
only available to the OS (such as information about NICs, and SAS and SATA drives that are not attached to the HP Smart Array
controller). HP AMS provides the data when the OS is running. HP AMS also receives Integrated Management Log (IML) events from
iLO 4 that get logged using the Linux syslog facility.
The subsystems monitored by the iLO 4, regardless of the operating system status, are:
• CPUs
• Memory
• Temperature sensors
• Fans
• Power supplies
• Smart Array controllers (including cache modules)
• Both logical and physical drives (internal to the server) that are connected to the HP Smart Array controller
Table 1 shows the various components monitored by HP Agentless Management without the HP Agentless Management Service
(column 2) and with the HP Agentless Management Service (column 3).
Table 1: Information provided by HP Agentless Management
Component HP Agentless Management without HP Agentless
Management Service
HP Agentless Management with
HP Agentless Management Service
Server health Fans
Temperatures
Power supplies
Memory
CPU
Fans
Temperatures
Power supplies
Memory
CPU
Storage Smart Array
SMART Drive Monitoring
Internal hard drives attached to Smart Array
Smart Array
HBA
SMART Drive Monitoring
Internal hard drives attached to Smart Array
NIC MAC addresses for embedded NICs Standup and embedded
MAC and IP address
Link Up/Down
Other iLO data
Firmware inventory
Operating system information (Host MIB)
iLO data
Firmware inventory
Driver/Service inventory
The iLO 4 Agentless Management feature supports inventory and configuration, health status, SNMP alerting, pre-failure alerting,
redundancy status and alerting, and SNMP data collection.
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