Managing the HPE Superdome X with the Onboard Administrator

The ability to provide out-of-band management is critical for enterprise-class servers. The HPE Superdome X is managed using the Superdome Onboard Administrator (OA). The OA is HPE’s blade enclosure management module. It provides the ability to manage system power, partition the system, and monitor component inventory and health.

The HPE Superdome X can have up to eight HPE BL920 Gen 9 Server Blades, where each Blade supports two Intel Xeon E7 4800/8800 v4 or v3 series processors. The system provides up to 24 cores per processor socket and up to 60 MB of shared L3 cache and 24 DIMMs per processor. Each BL920 Gen 9 Server Blade has its own Integrated Lights Out (iLO) processor. The OA collectively manages all of the different blades using each blade’s Platform Dependent Hardware (PDH) controller. You can see the HP OA in Figure 1

Figure 1 – The HP Onboard Administrator

In Figure 1 you can see the management ports offered by the HP Onboard Administrator.

Each HPE Superdome X enclosure is shipped with one OA module. You can have redundant OAs installed in the HPE Superdome X enclosure for enhanced availability. When two OA modules are present, they work in an active/standby mode.

The OA provides both local and remote management capabilities. It enables local management through the use of HP BladeSystem Insight Display,  which is a small local display. It provides remote management through its integrated Ethernet adapter, which you can connect to using a Web browser.

A configuration wizard enables fast setup and configuration. You can use the OA administrator to configure security roles for server, network and storage administrators. The OA administrator also enables you to monitor and control power and cooling information, and shows device health and status. The OA’s built-in Analysis Engine continually monitors all hardware to detect faults, predict failures and initiate automatic recovery actions. It optionally can send notifications to administrators and to HPE Insight remote support personnel.

HPE and Microsoft are the underwriters of this article.