Slow Virtual Media Over Webserver

[Micheal Waltz]

In leveraging the scripting ability of ILO I discovered that you can load a .iso file as virtual media via a web server. I followed the ILO CLI manual and setup the script, put the image on a web server, and it works, sorta.

I takes an extremely long time to actually work, almost 20 minutes until it start loading the vmlinuz to boot into the firmware maintenance CD. After making sure the script and network connections were good, I saw in the web server logs that it was getting a http 206 partial content error:

IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:36:21 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 2048
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:36:49 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:37:17 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:37:45 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:38:13 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:38:41 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384
IP - - [19/Jul/2010:15:39:09 -0700] "GET /firmware/hp_firmware.iso HTTP/1.1" 206 16384

Anyone know what's going on here and how to speed it up?

HP BL460 blade in a HP C7000 chassis with 1gig OA connections.
Apache 2.2.3-43.el5 from RHEL 5.5

ILO Script:















httpd.conf is generic and just has a html root dir with default options.

[Oscar A. Perez]

What iLO2 version do you have?
I recommend you the latest version 2.00 which has some virtual media performance improvements.
In term of performance, iLO2 virtual media will never be faster than 550Kb/sec because, its CPU cannot handle network traffic any faster.

Since you have HP C7000 chassis, I would also recommend you to use the OA v3.00 or later and mount the ISO image using the OA instead of an external web server.

[Micheal Waltz]

The blades have ILO 2.00, but the chassis is going to stick with OA 2.60 since we've found it stable and are waiting for a few bugs to get worked out in the 3.x series.

Does 3.x have an option to mount an ISO as virtual media to all blades in an enclosure? If this is the case that would work much better than what we've been doing.

As for the performance issues I believe it's an issue with how Apache is configured. I put the Virtual Media on a Ubuntu Apache server and it performs as expected.