iLO 4 v. 2.40 ugly GUI

[sborisv-lorton]

Hey people!

Situation:

We, small company that have only 27 IT pros supporting over 4800 physical servers have recently upgraded some of our iLO to v. 2.40. In couple of hours I have got tons of messages from my colleages complaining that they cannot work with new iLO GUI. The word "idiotic" was the most polite word they used. My manager urged me to downgrade those 60 servers iLO that were mistakenly upgraded to 2.40 back to 2.30.

Question: What is the way to switch iLO GUI to old style in v. 2.40?

Co-related question: What is the way to let HP know that we would like continue purchasing HP branded servers if they would be so polite to give us what we need instead of what somebody in HP design team decided to push to whole world?

Thanks to all,

SborisV

[Jan Soska]

Hello,

what exactly do you consider ugly? I do not see any significant change between ILO4 2.3 an 2.4, except of login screen with HPE logo...

Jan

[parnassus]

It's definitely not ugly.

I found it more modern than before and definitely quite clean as before, but this is just my personal opinion.

On the other hand, since HPE iLO4 2.40 was designed to cope with the new Hewlett Packard Enterprise's graphic style, its new style looks less "compact" or "minimalistic" with respect to the one available on HP iLO4 2.30 and previous releases.

You know...a lot of us like "compact" and "minimalistic" (which doesn't necessarily mean "poor") user interfaces...so, regarding the new style, I can say that HPE iLO4 bigger fonts leave somewhat less space on screen for information placement (look at two scrollbars!) and the new default font generally looks less clear in comparison to what I was used to see on the iLO4 2.30 and previous releases (the comparison was done using Mozilla Firefox 46 on a Linux laptop which has a normal 16" display).

See attached screenshots for reference.

I admit I didn't try a side-by-side comparative test using other suggested web browsers (Microsoft IE11 or Google Chrome) but, in the end, the real important thing is that any new iLO4 release adds new functionalities and fixes known issues.

[waaronb]

It's definitely different but to my eyes it was more about the change to HPE instead of HP and different logos and stuff.  I had no problem navigating around and finding things.  Everything is pretty much where it was before, just a little different menuing.

There was a much bigger change between ILO 2 and ILO 3 so I guess this change doesn't bug me as much.

Also, with that many servers to manage, you might be better off using XML scripting to make life easier than having to login and do things interactively.  I keep some common scripts handy for those times when I need to do some bulk changes or whatever and it can be a time saver even on a couple dozen machines.

There's also a nice program you can install on Windows that gives you a one-click way to connect to the remote console... "HPE iLO Integrated Remote Console".  Works with ILO 3 and ILO 4 and I like it in general, but it doesn't seem to remember anything past your last connection... you can't save shortcuts to specific machines, or at least I haven't figured out a way to do that.

Anyway, yeah, change can be hard but all in all I didn't think this was too bad.

[Jimmy Vance]

---

@waaronb wrote:

There's also a nice program you can install on Windows that gives you a one-click way to connect to the remote console... "HPE iLO Integrated Remote Console".  Works with ILO 3 and ILO 4 and I like it in general, but it doesn't seem to remember anything past your last connection... you can't save shortcuts to specific machines, or at least I haven't figured out a way to do that. 

---

I have a couple of folders full of shortcuts.  For the shortcut target you use:

IRC.exe -addr 10.11.12.13 -name UserName -password PassWord