HP Integrated Lights-Out

Integrated Lights-Out, or iLO, is a proprietary embedded server management technology by Hewlett-Packard which provides out-of-band management facilities. The physical connection is an Ethernet port that can be found on most Proliant servers of the 300 and above series.

iLO has similar functionality to the lights out management (LOM) technology offered by other vendors, for example Sun/Oracle's ILOM, Dell DRAC, the IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter and Cisco CIMC.

Features

iLO makes it possible to perform activities on an HP server from a remote location. The iLO card has a separate network connection (and its own IP address) to which one can connect via HTTPS. Possible options are:

• Reset the server (in case the server doesn't respond anymore via the normal network card)
• Power-up the server (possible to do this from a remote location, even if the server is shut down)
• Remote console (in some cases however an 'Advanced license' may be required for some of the utilities to work)
• Mount remote physical CD/DVD drive or image
• Access the server's IML (Integrated Management Log)
• Can be manipulated remotely through XML-based Remote Insight Board Command Language (RIBCL)
• Full CLI support through RS-232 port (shared with system), though the inability to enter Function keys prevents certain operations

iLO provides some other utilities like virtual media (CD, floppy), virtual power and a remote console. iLO is either embedded on the system board, or available as a PCI card.

Availability

iLO is embedded or available on some HP ProLiant and Integrity servers.

Prior to iLO, Compaq created several other lights out management products. The original was the Remote Insight Board (RIB), which was available as an EISA or PCI expansion card. RIB was replaced with RILOE (Remote Insight Light-Out Edition), which was only available for PCI. The original RILOE was replaced with RILOE II. HP stopped manufacturing RILOE II in 2006. The final firmware version if for RILOE is 2.53(A) dated 9 Mar 2004 and for RILOE II is 1.21 dated 5 July 2006.

For some ProLiant 100 series servers there is a "Lights Out 100" option, which has more limited functionality. The LO100 is a traditional IPMI BMC, and does not share hardware or firmware with iLO.

Versions

There have been multiple generations of iLO, each generation noted by a single digit number ("iLO 2"). Some generations of iLO are segmented into different editions, based on what features are licensed.^[1] iLO includes updatable firmware, for which HP periodically releases new versions.

Programming Interfaces

Several APIs exist for interacting with HP iLO:

• Perl: Net::ILO
• Python: python-hpilo
• Ruby: ILOrb
• Powershell: HP Scripting Tools for Windows Powershell

See also

• Out-of-band management
• List of Hewlett-Packard products
• Intel Active Management Technology (iAMT)

References

• Remote management, Integrated Lights-Out products at hp.com

External links

• FreeBSD/i386 Tools for ProLiant
• iLO 4 documentation