OneView 6.10 - Monitoring G7 (iLO3) Servers

[sgunelius]

We upgraded to OneView 6.10 VM appliance for monitoring most of our physical servers (ProLiant BL, DL & ML) back in March, but noticed that our older G7 servers (iLO3) no longer report Device Inventory, Memory & Storage details.  The last is particularly troublesome as that is where we experience the most common issues (failed or predictive failed HDDs) on these older servers.

We can't rollback to the previous version (5.60) as there were some fixes in 6.10 that we required and we'll need to continue monitoring/supporting the G7 servers for a while.  The only workaround HPE support has come up with is that we deploy another OneView 5.60 appliance to support the G7s alongside the 6.10 appliance (Gen8-10).

Has anyone found a better approach for monitoring G7 servers in conjunction with their OneView 6.10 appliance?  Thank you.

[ChrisLynch]

We didn't make any changes within OneView to deprecate or remove Gen7 server support.  Can you PM me your support case so we can look at it?  I do not agree with the advise support provided you, and instead we should look into what happened.

[ChrisLynch]

BTW, can you also describe what exactly is missing?  Please keep in mind that we didn't add extended inventory support that we did with Gen8-Gen10 servers.  You will also need to ensure the Insight Manager Agents are installed on the host in order to get additional data due to the non-existance SNMP stack in iLO3.  The iLO must be configured with SNMP Passthrough, so the IMA can respond to those SNMP queries from OneView.

[sgunelius]

Chris,

It was an HPE engineer who gave me a "heads up" a few months ago that the aforementioned details would be lost from any iLO3 server being monitored from OneView.  I'm not sure whether it was the upgrade to the "milestone" 6.0 release or the subsequent 6.10 version we're running.  Our biggest issue is that we no longer see any storage details when a server with iLO3 is selected:

Storage inventory collection is not supported for this server model.

We're working with our HPE Datacenter Care support team on this issue and they were the ones who recommended that we may need to run an older OneView appliance to support the iLO3 chipset servers.

Scott

[ChrisLynch]

We have never supported that data with Gen6 and Gen7 servers.  Only Gen8 and newer do we have the ability to collect that data.

[sgunelius]

Chris,

According to the HPE OneView Support Matrix for versions 5.6, 6.0 & 6.10, under the Monitored Server Hardware section; the ProLiant G6 (iLO2) and G7 (iLO3) are supported for monitoring.  As shown in the extract (see attached); Inventory seems to be a key feature, but that isn't the case.

Scott

[ChrisLynch · Accepted solution]

Yes, it does. However, the only inventory data we can report for Gen6 and Gen7 is number of CPU's, CPU type and how much RAM is installed.  Extended inventory data like adapters, storage controllers and attached drives is not part of the inventory capability of OneView.  We only have the Gen6 and Gen7 monitoring support is for legacy support.  Those platforms are well out of support, we have not gone back to add the additional inventory data, nor do we have any plans to.

So, I'm not sure why the engineer you spoke with told you "changes were coming in 6.10".  We have made no changes to inventory data since 5.60, where we added iLO4 inventory data support to match iLO5 inventory data we added in 5.20.

One thing I will ask my team to look at is to update the support matrix here to add another footnote about the type of inventory data supported with Gen6 and Gen7.

[sgunelius]

Chris,

Thanks for the information.  It would've been nice to see that level of detail in the document, they just list "View inventory data" with a checkmark like it's all good.  I'd rather be done with these G7 servers, but unfortunately they're not slated for replacement for another year or so, even though I've explained how expensive they've become to support on our DCC.

Would you happen to know if the "Monitor health and alerts" feature is as misleading or as long as I keep SNMP and the HP Systems Insight Management Agents installed, we'll actually see heatlh issues reported through OneView for monitored servers?

Scott

[ChrisLynch]

As stated in the support matrix, you must have the Insight Manager Agents installed along with the ILO set to SNMP Pass through. If you change any of that, you will lose alerting of events. ILO3 does not have an SNMP stack to report device events. It relies upon the IMA agents to be present and configured with SNMP, not WMI/WBEM.

[sgunelius]

Chris,

I realized I didn't go back and answer your question about what's missing on a G7 when selected within OneView; I see most of the Hardware details displayed in the right pane, but here's where the details become scant:

Firmware and Drivers
Component Installed
iLO 1.94 Dec 06 2020
Intelligent Provisioning n/a
System ROM P68 05/21/2018

Device Inventory
Device inventory collection is not supported for this server model.

Ports
Port information is not collected for this server model.

Memory
Memory inventory collection is not supported for this server model.

Storage
Storage inventory collection is not supported for this server model.