HP Proliant and the rigors of learning....

[FremontPC]

Thought it might be a good idea to delve into the world of servers, had a couple of encounters back in the Win2k days, but managed to avoid them entirely since then.

Soooo, I missed out on a $100 DL380 G6 that I had my eye on, but found a G7 on Ebay. 2x Xeon 2.67, 32GB RAM, 1 300GB HDD. Coupla hundred clams, shipped. Filled in with some 146GB drives and I d/l Server 2012r2. I go over some sites about installing r2 on pre- G8 hardware, get the r2 setup going and figure I'll get the SPP from HP as r2 is updating.

Ha-ha-haaaaa! HP service agreement required to d/l the Service Pack for Proliant! Welcome to Hardware As A Service, if you want to run anything other than linux.

Ok, I get it. It takes money to bring old hardware up to date, but Dell doesn't play it that way, do they?

 

[Markverhyden]

wow!!! That's a surprise.

 

[Moltuae]

I hit that hurdle too when I bought some used G7s a year or two ago. No current warranty/agreement, no download support.

You just need to acquire the SPP from elsewhere. I got version 2013.09.0 at the time from my server supplier (let me know if you need this), but you can usually find them online.

Found this after a quick search (haven't tried these myself):
http://blog.degree.no/2015/04/hp-service-pack-for-proliantspp-when-you-dont-have-care-pack/

 

[BlackLabTechs]

I heard they (HP) were going to do that a while back. Dell doesn't do it today and as far as I know Lenovo doesn't but I'm not 100% sure on that one.

 

[FremontPC]

Carly was behind this, I'm certain of it!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Most of it can individually be downloaded from the support site however, for free.

 

[TurricanII]

The firmware updates for hard drives, RAID controllers and BIOS updates can not be downloaded individually either without a live warranty. Just what you need when you are selling servers costing over £3000. HP claims this restriction helps in some way to protect their Intellectual Property. Sounds like rubbish of course and more like a ploy to get everyone to buy warranty extensions.

Another reason to look Dell or Supermicro and building cheaper servers but having redundancy/replication of VM's instead of paying much more for HP's higher MTBF

 

[Markverhyden]

This is disappointing to say the least. Kind of reminds me of the Cisco ecosystem.

The SPP is available for customers to download and use on products which are under an active warranty or an HP
Support Agreement.

From - http://h20195.www2.hpe.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/c03681570.pdf

 

[FremontPC]

I managed to get some updates applied in any case. Struggling to understand just what it is that I'm updating though! LOL!

 

[TurricanII]

You will at least want to update the firmware on all of the hard drives and all the RAID controller and download the latest RAID controller driver. The biggest issue I have seen with out-of-date firmware is premature erroneous hard drive failure reports and complete crashes of the raid array due to glitches in the firmware.

Not critical issues I suppose on a training box but HP does seem to go out of its way to dissuade companies from reselling their kit

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I managed to get some updates applied in any case. Struggling to understand just what it is that I'm updating though! LOL!

Drill into the support section of HPE.COM...servers...select your product, select your OS. Not too different from desktop computers in how you find the drivers/support.
Here's an example for a Proliant DL360p gen8 for Server 08R2
http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/readIndex?sp4ts.oid=5194968&swLangOid=8&swEnvOid=4064

Each component...you can drill in and get a product description. So for servers, not only do you have drivers like a standard desktop, but there are management applications (and agents for that app), BIOS, firmware, etc.
Under Software/Systems management...you'll find many components. Important ones like the Array Configuration Utility. (so you can view/manage through a GUI within Windows). Of course you can also do them in the BIOS during bootup...but since servers run 24x7x365...it's important to be able to do this from within the running server too, avoiding downtime.
iLO is pretty cool too....do things remotely at the hardware level. You can even build a server through iLO remotely...from booting from the ISO to install Windows...and up.
Once you learn it, you'll see why HP is up top for servers. Simply put...they're the best.

 

[freedomit]

ILO is cool and a life saver! I once remote rebooted a server and it didn't come back online as a DVD had been left in the drive and was set to boot from DVD before the RAID. After a mini panic I realised I could connect to the ILO change the boot order and reboot the Server.

 

[CHI-Tech]

ILO is cool and a life saver! I once remote rebooted a server and it didn't come back online as a DVD had been left in the drive and was set to boot from DVD before the RAID. After a mini panic I realised I could connect to the ILO change the boot order and reboot the Server.

A few of those and you'll have gray hair like me! ;-)