HP

UPDATE: Since writing this article in November it does not appear this fix works anymore. I am guessing the AES/3DES ciphers have been deprecated in modern browsers. I can confirm David’s comment using Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge does work.

To enable IE mode, launch edge and type edge://settings/defaultBrowser in the address bar. From the Allow sites to be reloaded in Internet Explorer mode drop-down, select Allow.

Navigate to your iLO URL, select the three dots in the top right (Settings), and pick Reload in Internet Explorer mode from the menu. Edge will remember this setting on each subsequent visit.

If you are trying to connect a modern browser such as Microsoft Edge to HPe’s Integrated Lights Out 3 (iLO 3) management interface, you may receive the following error and be blocked from accessing the iLO webpage.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

Unsupported protocol
The client or server don't support a common SSL protocol version or cipher suite.

To resolve this error, I recommend ensuring you are on the latest iLO 3 firmware from HPe. At the time of writing, 1.94 was the latest HPe firmware for iLO 3 (released Dec 17, 2020). Firmware can be updated in several ways, including uploading the BIN file via the iLO webpage or online from any number of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and VMware. Also, refer to the HPe documentation on how to upgrade your firmware.

Once you have the latest firmware, log into the iLO webpage from an older browser, such as Internet Explorer. Then, from the left navigation menu, expand Administration and select Security.

From the Security page, select the Encryption tab.

Then, under the Encryption Enforcement Settings section, toggle the Enforce AES/3DES Encryption dropdown to Enabled.

Click Apply.

Previous: How to add space to an HP StoreVirtual Virtual SAN Appliance – PART I

In our previous article, we got a lot accomplished.

• We added hard drives to both of our servers.
• We prepared our existing virtual environment for maintenance.
• We then booted into HP Intelligent Provisioning and created a logical RAID 5 array.
• We created an exclusive datastore in VCenter for the VSAs.
• We added all that datastore space as virtual disks to the VSA virtual machines.

We are now ready for these new disks to be provisioned in the HP Management Console. Part II leads off with Step 6.

An HP Virtual SAN Appliance is a great way to take existing local storage from multiple physical servers and combine them into a Virtual SAN. A Virtual SAN is a great way to get all the benefits of a traditional SAN, but at a fraction of the cost. In essence, the SAN is entirely software-based. The Virtual SAN Appliances (VSAs) that make up the SAN can be hosted either on VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V.

This particular article will focus on how to increase the storage space on a Virtual SAN Appliance that is already in production. It will focus specifically on a storage appliance hosted on VMware. In our scenario we will have two Virtual SAN Appliances, each running on VMware ESXi 5.1 with HP ProLiant Gen8 hardware. A Fail-Over Manager (FOM) will also exist and its sole purpose is to act as a tie-breaker during elections.

Storage system [FOM NAME] ([IP ADDRESS]) did not join the management group [MANAGEMENT GROUP NAME].

The required directory /etc/lefthand/data is not mounted. Please restore OS using recovery media.

I ran into this error recently while trying to add an HP LeftHand Failover Manager (running on Hyper-V) to a management group with two HP LeftHand VSAs (running on VMware ESXi 5.1). We were using SAN iQ 10.5.

I tried blowing the FOM away multiple times and reinstalling from scratch but this did not help. I ended up calling  HP and this is a known issue that they are working on. There is no patch yet but there is a workaround.

So, I finally got to set up my first Gen8 server. It is a ProLiant DL360e Gen8. Two actually. At first, I was very happy with all the new advancements. No more searching for a SmartStart CD you say! Brilliant! No more confusion on SmartStart version compatibility? Wicked! (Yes, there is a VERY fine line of SmartStart CD’s that will support both a ProLiant DL360 G4p and putting Server 2008 R2 on it – I like to live dangerously!). So, as many of you already know Intelligent Provisioning replaced SmartStart CDs. The cool part is, you just boot right into it. Its an option – F10 at POST. Neat huh? And it looks so sharp too. (Check the image below)

They have this neat feature called Firmware Update that will directly connect to HP.com (or a local update server) and get all your firmware updates for you. Very neat. Especially useful if we are using an OS like VMware ESXi. So I configured the network settings on both my servers and got the error in the screenshot below.

I checked my settings a dozen times on both servers, tried different IPs, different NIC ports on the server and sadly no luck. It just wouldn’t connect. I called HP and the first tech has me update from v1.30 to v1.40.88. Sadly this did not help. I called back (different tech this time) and they told me this is a known issue with certain servers running certain system firmware versions and that they are working on it.

Insert sad face. 🙁

This seems like a really cool feature. I just wish I could test it. Until then, I will be going back to downloading the bootable Service Pack for ProLiant DVD.