ILO Management Interface Driver for Windows Server 2022?

[Matt-LDN]

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to find the ILO Management Interface Driver for Windows Server 2022 (ILO3)  and I was wondering if there is such a thing?

Any help most appreciated!

Thanks,
Matt

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. Advisory: (Revision) HP Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) - Disabling HP iLO Management Channel Interface Driver in Windows Device Manager will Disable iLO 2 Remote Console Keyboard / Mouse and Cause Long Delay During Boot

2. Windows Server 2022

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[Cali · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

one of the latest Servers with iLO3 is DL380 Generation 7 and this is Retired since 2013.
Usually, HPE delivers 5 Years after retirement Spare Parts and Software Updates.
Maybe a bit longer if there is a critical Bug found.
As far I can see, the latest OS Support was Windows 2008 R2.

But this is 8 Years after Retirement and it will be safe to say, that there will never come a Windows 2022 Support for the entire Server including iLO3.

Cali.

[waaronb]

I was curious to see how my dusty old DL360 G6 would do running Server 2022, so I fired it up the other day and installed, directly from the downloaded ISO.

It actually installs just fine and runs. I installed the Server 2012 version of the ILO2 drivers which make device manager happy, but after installing the agents and SMH, it doesn't actually seem to be pulling any data on the hardware.

It does make the remote console mouse and keyboard happy (it syncs up the mouse cursor, which normally wanders around seemingly on it's own without that driver installed), so there is that.

I'm going to try the same thing on a G7 at some point with the ILO3. It may work a little better... the ILO2 is just so ancient that I'm surprised it worked at all, but the ILO3 even works with modern browsers. LOL - For ILO2 I'm stuck using IE since the SSL on it only supports outdated ciphers (and probably not TLS 1.2).

So, if you really want to give it a shot, for the G7 just grab the latest drivers (which are probably for Server 2012 R2) and use those. It'll either work or it won't, but it might be enough for your needs.

[Matt-LDN]

Thanks so much! I tried the 2012 ILO3 driver and it installed just fine.

I haven't been able to get other drivers to install but that's ok - the DL380 is just for my home lab and it doesn't matter that I don't have the management agents etc on it. The ILO is handy to have though!

Thanks  for your help!

Matt

[waaronb]

For what it's worth, I finally had a chance today to try updating my Proliant DL360 G7 to Server 2022.

The update went fine and it runs great, but I got the same issue afterwards with the ILO driver.

Device Manager says "HP Baseboard Management Controller IPMI Device" couldn't start with error 10. That's about what I expected, so I'm not surprised by it. It still works fine, and I'll just ignore that error.

The HP System Management Homepage relies on that driver interface working so it can query the hardware, so it's basically useless - if you want to look at hardware health, best to use the ILO3 webpage itself and go from there.

Honestly, for hardware that's over a decade old, it still has life in it and it suits its purpose well. Some day I'll pick up a used G9 or G10 and update, but hopefully this little gem has another year or so of useful life. I'm more worried about the drives failing.

[waaronb]

(cut and paste from a similar thread about Server 2019 on a G6...)

Follow up... I decided to look closer at the DL360 G7 I updated to Server 2022 yesterday. Turns out I just had to uninstall the "HP Baseboard Management Controller IPMI Device" driver that was failing to start. Didn't need it.

For SMH, initially it wasn't showing me any data and couldn't contact the management controller (ILO). I ended up uninstalling SMH and the HP WBEM driver, and then reinstalling (WBEM first, then SMH). There's a trick to it though...

I left my "C:\HP\hpsmh" folder intact after uninstalling SMH. Then I installed HP WBEM, but if you just run the cpxxxx.exe installer, it fails because it does a check and will only work on Server 2016 or older. The key is to just use 7z or something to extract the contents of that and you'll see an MSI file in there. Just install that MSI and you're good to go.

Another tip... The DL360 G7 driver download page does have the WBEM installer, but if you cruise over to the DL360 Gen9 page instead, they have a newer version of it. Version 11.1.0.0 (instead of 10.75.0.0 I think).  Version 10.75 might actually still let you install on Server 2019/2022, since the version 11 release notes say something about fixing an issue that let you install on unsupported products.

After reinstalling WBEM then, I reinstalled SMH and everything is looking good. I think one of my problems was that I had been using SNMP instead of WBEM previously (wbem was missing data for some components... can't remember what now).

End result is now that SMH is using WBEM and shows most things. Array and drives, cpu, memory, ILO., NICs It shows a question mark for the "temperature" data.

Now that it's working, I may back up that hpsmh folder and try switching it back to SNMP to see what happens... but the good news is, it basically works, and I once again have an easy way to check on system health... more or less.

[Matt-LDN]

Thanks so much! That's a nice piece of work. I'll give it a try soon.

[Cali]

Well done, I will save this solution for future use.

Cali

[waaronb]

Yeah, I hope it's helpful to people who might still want to enjoy their older systems and use the latest Windows Server.

Follow up on my SNMP experiment... switched it to snmp and it couldn't read any info. I'm pretty sure my SNMP is setup correctly with a valid read-only community string, but it just wasn't showing anything. I went back to WBEM and it's fine. I still think that SNMP was a better, and faster, way to get the data, and WBEM still seems to fail to get some info, but it'll do.

I'm still not sure why the temperature data is missing... I'm using WMI Explorer to look through the HPQ namespace but I'm not seeing any temperature/thermal/cooling data in there. I know it used to work when it was 2012 R2. I may need to lookup the SNMP OIDs and use snmp walk to look through and see if the SNMP data is actually still showing up. Or, I could just reinstall the agents. Maybe that would help, just in case some namespaces or data ended up dropping somehow. Worth a shot.