As I wrote earlier in my blog on Deep Storage Integration in VMM 2012, Microsoft decided to embrace standards as much as possible in SCVMM 2012. This is also the case in the area of Out of Band Management (OOB). Microsoft supports several standards based options:

  • Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware (SMASH), a DMTF standard which works via WS-MAN (with the exception of the Command-Line Protocol CLP)
  • Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)
  • Data Center Management Interface (DCMI)

OOB is of course intended to take control of the bare metal machine using some kind of baseboard management controller (BMC). In the HP world we know OOB very well by the name of Insight Lights Out (iLO2 and iLO3). Dell has a BMC called DRAC which stands for Dell Remote Access Controller. IBM has a Remote Supervisor Adapter or RSA. OOB can serve several purposes. One is power state control (query status, power on and power off) but also to collect information about the server hardware (SMBIOS GUID, Manufacturer, Model, AssetTag, Serial Number) or to collect system hardware logs. The ultimate goal is to leave the bare metal untouched, yet under your total control.

We can think of several scenarios:

  • Bare Metal Deployment
  • Dynamic Optimization
  • Power Optimization

The Out of Band Management interface in SCVMM 2012 is fully extensible and offers custom OOB Configuration Providers. Here is an example of such a provider in Powershell.

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To discover bare metal servers, all you have to know is the range of IP addresses or the subnet of the baseboard management controllers in those servers. If you fire off a discovery to a bunch of HP ProLiant servers you must select a Run As account and select an OOB management protocol.

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If you open the pull-down list for OOB Protocols you won’t find HP iLO so try one of the others. SMASH will return no information, so we can be sure that HP iLO2 is non-SMASH compliant.

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All you have to know is the subnet or IP range of the iLO’s

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If you try out IPMI and DCMI  with iLO2 they will render only the SMBios GUID which uniquely identifies the bare metal server. HP iLO3 however does support SMASH as well as IPMI and DCMI.

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If you really want to get all the details you can add the custom OOB Provider for HP iLO. In the current version you will have to follow a procedure to add this non-standard OOB provider.

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In my next blog Adding HP iLO as an OOB Management Protocol in SCVMM 2012, I will explain what software to download and what steps to take to fully integrate HP iLO in SCVMM 2012.

Update April 17, 2011 One plausible reason why iLO2 does not answer to SMASH is that SMASH is not supported in the beta of SCVMM 2012