HP iLO4

About 10 years ago Hewlett Packard released the Proliant Microserver Gen8. A number of my friends & colleagues had one and convinced me I needed to buy one.

So thats what I did. At the time, this thing was about £80-100 and I remember getting it with a cashback offer, so it only ended up costing me about £30-50 once I received this back. Bargain!

I threw in a couple of drives that I had at the time, some WD Red 3TB drives and installed OpenMediaVault onto an SSD that was plugged into the ODD port which was wedged into a little area at the top of the case where an optical drive would normally go. Brilliant, I now had a NAS running some enterprise level hardware.

Over the years, this thing evolved, more drives were obtained and the OS, following my linux knowlege getting better, swapped to Ubuntu. And this is how its been for pretty much the last 8-10 years.

Whilst I was aware of its iLO function, I never bothered with it.......until now. I so wish I had sooner. iLO, in a word....ROCKS!

This has allowed me to do a while host of things (i knew were possible) but never actually did. I don't know, I think i felt, it was too much hassle. iLO has allowed me to apply the latest HP Support Pack, update the firmware for iLO itself (which brings one huge benefit IMO and also upgrade the BIOS (system rom as HP call it)

The latest iLO firmware (v2.82) enables a remote console using HTML5. no need to use a java plugin or a .net framework extention and with an iLO license, I can feed it an ISO and have the machine automagically boot from this.

Currently, the machine is still running the original celeron processor that it came with but I do have a xeon 1265L V2 CPU ready to drop in it. I will cover the installation of this in another post and will provide some actual pictures of the process.

Thanks for reading folks!