SCVMM 2012 – Adding HP iLO as an OOB provider

In the previous post I went into some detail about Out of Band Management (OOB) options in SCVMM 2012 and how bare metal servers can be discovered via an IP range via an OOB provider. After installation of SCVMM 2012 you’ll discover that HP iLO is not a standard option. However a custom OOB provider for HP iLO is offered and can be configured via the following procedure.

First of all we have to download the HP Lights Out Configuration Utility and install it on the SCVMM 2012 server. You can get this utility from HP’s Software and Drivers site and is located under the ProLiant server model and operating system version. If you install this program, take note of the installation directory which defaults to C:\Program Files (x86)\HP\cpqlocfg because next you’ll have to get the HP Lights-Out XML Scripting Sample for Windows. As a third step you must copy the files to same directory where you installed the iLO Configuration Utility.

Make two copies of Set_Host_Power and rename them to Set_Host_Power_Off and Set_Host_Power_On.  Change the command <SET_HOST_POWER HOST_POWER=”No” in the first file and to “Yes in the second. Do not change anything else in these files.

Go to the Microsoft Connect site https://connect.microsoft.com/site799/Downloads (You have to register for SCVMM 2012 beta with a Windows Live account) and download the SCVMM 2012 Beta Configuration Provider for HP ILO2. This supplemental download will allow you to control HP servers that doe not support or are not enabled for IPMI out of band management. The file contains a DLL file and a Powershell script:

Copy these files to a directory on the SCVMM 2012 server.
Start a command prompt with Administrator privileges, start powershell and issue the following commands:

get-ExecutionPolicy –> make a note of the current policy
Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned
cd [directory of copied *.dll and *.ps1 files)
.\registeroobprovider.ps1 “c:\program files (x86)\hp\cpqlocfg”
Set-ExecutionPolicy Restricted –> or the policy that was configured before changing it

When these steps have completed successfully you’ll need to restart the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Console or reconnect  to it.

We should now be ready to discover bare metal HP servers via the HP iLO2 OOB provider. Go to the Fabric wunderbar, click on Add Resources from the Ribbon and select Hyper-V Hosts and Clusters.

Choose Physical computers to be provisioned into Hyper-V hosts.

If the previous steps were successful you should be able to see HP Integrated Lights-Out (ILO 2) from the OOBE protocol list.

Supply an IP subnet or a range of IP addresses you know the BMC’s should be in and press Next.

As you can see the custom OOB provider for HP iLO 2 works as expected. Although I haven’t tried out yet, you’ll find that the iLO 3 supports one or more of the built-in standard OOB providers so might not have to go through all these steps.

In my next blog I will describe how to Prepare the Host Profile before we reach our final goal: Bare Metal Configuration and Cluster Creation.

If you’ve been successful using the iLO 3 without the custom provider, please leave a comment.