SAS drive update, HP ProLiant DL360e Gen8 and registration, monitoring service

[chief_media]

We recently picked up a HP ProLiant DL360e and during setup we skipped the registration process to get the machine up and running. Is there a way to register this product to this account so that we get notification when there's a new SPP or other important updates?

Also, are there some free alternatives that give some sort of notification when one of the RAID drives fail or the temperatures reach a certain temp? Anything to give real-time stats on the server from my desktop?

Lastly, we pulled the four SAS drives from the old decommissioned server to serve as the OS partition... one of the four drives we're using said it required an update during the RAID creation process. any idea how to proceed with that? is it possible to do while the system is live?

[waaronb]

If you sign into your HP passport account there's a place in there to add serial #'s to the account. I'm not 100% sure if that's the same thing as registering it officially so make sure you check that out.

HP SIM is available for monitoring HP systems. It can be setup to email on whatever severity items you like. It's free but it can be a bit of a resource hog sometimes (during startup it can use a lot of CPU when it's doing whatever). Most of the time it's not too bad besides memory usage.

The Gen8 models have ILO 4 which has it's own email notifications. It's pretty cool... basic, like you can't totally customize what it sends out, but it will send alerts if the system reboots or if there's a new IML entry, failed hardware, etc.

Smart Array controllers have some built-in list of what the latest drive firmware revisions are, and if there's a critical one that should be installed to any drives in your system, it will let you know.

Find the support pack for that drive and install it, easy as that. Upgrading the drive firmware will require a reboot (it's done from a running OS, but the firmware itself isn't applied until during the reboot since it will stop all I/O and restart the drive to finish).

[LouisH]

Just a comment....the Gen8 servers use different SAS drive carriers then previous generations. Normally the disks would have at least a 1 year warranty, but in this case I don't know if HP would cover them if you use them in your "new" server.

I know the drives WILL work (they won't latch into the backplane unless the carrier is changed), just very doubtful about support coverage.

regards,

Louis

[waaronb]

Good point about the drive carrier change. When I read the original email, I assumed he pulled them from another Gen8. :)