Welcome to the new Hewlett Enterprise Around the Storage Block video blog.
I’m your host, HPE Storage Guy, Calvin Zito.
Hey, I’ve got an opportunity to be in Houston and really learn about some of the new innovations
with our ProLiant Gen10. One of those things that’s really cool is what’s new with iLO 5,
and I’ve got Doug with me. Doug, why don’t you first introduce yourself to everybody?
Hi, I’m Doug Haskell. I am the Firmware R&D Manager for our iLO product.
Now, what I really want to do is focus on is have you show us iLO 5.
We’re going to do a demo. But if you had to tell folks that what you really want them to remember
about what’s new and cool about iLO 5, what is it?
Well, iLO 5, we’re going to focus on things like security, ease of firmware update,
agentless management. We got a lot of great new capabilities
and I look forward to showing them to you.
Well, why don’t we get to it, and let’s look at them.
Let’s do it!
Before we jump to the demo, I want to submit to you Around the Storage Block podcast No. 227.
You can see on the screen where you can find it: either on iTunes or Talkshoe,
or you can find it on Around the Storage Block blog.
And specifically you want No. 227 because in that podcast Doug and I are going to talk about
the security features in the new iLO 5 ASIC.
Things like the Silicon Root of Trust, and this is where the iLO 5 ASIC can validate the iLO firmware,
the system ROM and other firmware in the system.
And we can even validate that the OS is what it’s supposed to be.
We covered a lot of ground about security in that podcast and
I think you will understand why Doug makes the case that HPE ProLiant Gen10 servers
are designed to be the most secure industry-standard server on the planet.
So check out that podcast and let’s look at the demo with Doug.
So what are we looking at here?
One of the most important capabilities we have in iLO is something that we’ve had
since the beginning of the system, and that’s the ability to manage the server remotely,
where you are, not where the server is.
And that’s really what ‘lights-out management’ means... is you’re not going into the data center
to manage the system; you turn the lights out and you manage it remotely.
So here we’re connected up to the web browser interface.
You see all the different things we can do on the menu.
And new with iLO 5 is this Remote Console thumbnail.
And so this is actually a slowly refreshing...
but it’s a thumbnail of what’s actually on the server right now.
So even before I launch Remote Console I can see what’s here on the console.
So let me toggle over and pull it up.
And so here we have the actual Remote Console of this server.
And you see I’m in the middle of updating the server and getting it installed,
and I can do that remotely.
So I can interact with it. I’ve got the remote keyboard video and mouse for the server.
I can also connect up virtual media images.
So I can connect a folder off of this laptop up to the server,
and it’ll show up on that server as if a USB drive was connected.
So I don’t have to go plug in media to the system; I can do it remotely.
So you can have your OS images, basically, is what that is,
and you can boot whatever OS you want to boot based on your PC here.
Yes, absolutely. I can deploy operating systems.
In fact, one time I was getting ready for a trade show
and I had eight different Remote Console windows open.
I was deploying eight operating systems from my house, over the VPN,
to servers that were here at work, while I was watching a baseball game.
So that’s a good use of time. I can deploy eight operating systems
and watch a baseball game, all at the same time.
Alright.
I also have control over the power of the server.
I can turn the server on, turn it off. All that I can do remotely.
I can create recordings: record and playback.
Another server here using our DVR controls,
and I can also do collaboration mode where you and I - even though we’re in different cities -
can be connected up to the same system and both working on
the same server at the same time through our collaboration mode.
We’ve had all that for quite a while. It’s just new. It’s just faster
and more crisp with the new performance of the iLO 5 chip.
So based on what you’ve told me so far, in new ASICS,
what’s going to be the benefit to the customer of that new ASIC?
OK. In addition to the security stuff I mentioned earlier
the iLO 5 chip is twice as fast as iLO 4.
So we have two times the CPU horsepower, two times the memory,
two times the ROM storage as well. So everything’s faster with iLO 5.
And we all want to be able to manage things faster.
We sure do. Absolutely.
Another thing I want to talk about here is our agentless management capability.
So for a very long time - 25 years of OS-based agents - we’ve been
using OS software to manage the system.
Starting in Gen8 and continuing into Gen9, we had agentless management,
and what that means is that agent functionality is now built into the iLO firmware.
And so we can monitor temperature sensors, fans, power supply, CPU, memory, storage,
networking of the server, and iLO can send SNMP alerts, RESTful events,
remote syslog events, email alerts... all that comes inside of the firmware.
So now we’re not using CPU cycles to run the agents on the OS.
Yeah, that’s certainly true. Our customers purchase their server to run a purpose
and we’re going to run the management cycles on the management CPU and
give them all of the power of the main CPU to run their main application.
So here I’m going to select the storage tab. This is one of the things that we monitor
in an agentless fashion. So the iLO firmware is speaking directly to
the Smart Array firmware and gathering all of this information.
It doesn’t matter whether we’ve got an OS installed or not;
the firmware can talk to each other. And so we see what the logical configuration
of the server is, of the drives, we see the physical health of the drives as well.
All of this is monitored agentlessly, and if there was an alert
we’d send out the exact same SNMP trap that the OS-based agents would have sent.
So you see all of this information, all the storage information on this particular server.
A lot of good stuff.
We’re also going to monitor the thermals of the system.
So here on the Power and Thermal tab, you’ll see in addition to having power control
we are also going to be able to monitor the temperatures inside the server.
We’re going to draw a really nifty-looking 3D display of the heat inside the server
from front to back. Very exciting.
There’s up to 64 different temperature sensors inside the system, and we’re going to
monitor all that, we’re going to run fancy process control algorithms with the purpose of
running the fans at the minimum possible speed.
So I remember a couple of years ago we talked a lot about this Sea of Sensors.
This is exactly...
Absolutely what this is. You bet that’s what this.
The thermal Sea of Sensors is what we’re looking at here.
Because we want to run the fans as slow as possible.
We want to save the customers power and money every hour of every day.
And, in fact, speaking of power, every PROI server has a built-in power meter,
where we can see what the power consumption of the system is.
We’ve updated this capability for iLO 5. It’s got a new, fancier-looking feel to it,
but we’re still monitoring what’s the average power consumption, what’s the
peak power consumption, given the ability to set a power cap either in watts or in Btu hours.
So we’re going to take good care of the system and make sure that it’s not
consuming more power than it should.
In addition to monitoring the server’s health and the ability to send in better MO support events...
if there’s a drive that fails we can let the customer know before they know.
We’ll pick a... iLO firmware will notify HPE that there’s a drive that failed.
We’re going to look up the warranty information, the service support information,
and get back directly to the customer to let them know that, ‘Hey, a new part’s on its way’.
And we also have built in our Active Health System Viewer, our Active Health System.
And so, the HS log is always on, diagnostic capabilities where throughout the day
we’re recording telemetry information.
Every time the server boots we’re going to take a snapshot of the server’s configuration,
create a configuration history of the server.
And this information’s really vital to us in figuring out challenging problems and helping
the customer get their system back in business quickly.
And new for this year, this spring we launched our online Active Health System Viewer.
So customers can actually download their AHS files and they can upload it to our
Active Health System Viewer, which you see the link here, ‘Active Health System viewer’...
and then they can diagnose and troubleshoot problems.
The AHS Viewer has a rules engine built into it, where it can tell them,
by looking at the AHS data, ‘Hey, here’s a particular situation we think that we detected,
and here’s an advisory on how to resolve that for you. Here’s a video or
here’s troubleshooting information on how to fix that problem.
So bottom line, this is kind of like analytics that the customer uploads to this website
and runs this analytics engine and looks at existing known problems,
existing known fixes and makes recommendations... the customer... how to address those.
Right. We can detect things in the AHS log that are known issues and
we can help point them to quick resolutions really easily. So they can either go to it
through this or browse to www.hpe.com/servers/ahsv - ‘Active Health System Viewer’ -
and they can get started triaging their own AHS files.
Yes, there’s our URL in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen...
And there it is. You can see it. Good job!
... hovering over it.
OK, so things that are really important to us: we’ve talked about the security of the system;
we’ve talked about a better, faster Remote Console capability;
we’ve talked about agentless management and better remote support, Active Health System Viewer.
So those are some of the cool things that have come in with iLO 5.
Well it’s definitely a very cool set of features that customers have.
I remember doing something with iLO a couple of years ago,
and the advancements we’ve made here have been very very cool.
Thank you very much. We’ve been working really hard at it.
We’re proud of iLO 5 and we’re looking forward to pleasing our customers with it.
Doug, that was a fantastic demo. For people that want to learn more about iLO and iLO 5,
where can they find it?
I hope you really enjoyed it. I think we had some really awesome capabilities in iLO 5.
You can find more at www.hpe.com/info/ilo.
Great. Thanks for joining me.
You bet! Thank you.
You can find me on Twitter as ‘Calvin Zito’, and you can find my blog at hpe.com/storage/blog.
Until next time, thanks for joining me.