UPDATE: May 10, 2019. As with any high-quality software, there are major updates to report for iLO Amplifier Pack! I'll be sharing two of the most critical updates now and leaving the below article intact so that you can see where this all started.

HPE InfoSight for Servers. In January 2019, HPE launched InfoSight for servers to bring health reporting, alerting, and more from InfoSight to HPE servers with iLO 4 and up. To avoid pointing your servers directly to the outside world, iLO Amplifier Pack is leveraged to aggregate server health reporting and then send it home to InfoSight where it can be put to use streamlining your operations and reducing TCO.

Simplified Licensing. There's now just one iLO Advanced license. No more confusion over Essentials vs Advanced vs Advanced for Blade Servers vs Premium Security. Also, all iLO 5 advanced security features are now included at the iLO Advanced license level. Be sure to update to version 1.40 to see this benefit.

For well over a decade, iLO has been synonymous with HPE servers, with ever-increasing features and functionality, including the Silicon Root of Trust introduced with Gen10 which you may have already heard about. What you may not have heard about however, is HPE's new iLO Amplifier pack. This new, free, software simplifies the monitoring and management of your ProLiant servers (Gen8 and newer), while also adding new functionality not previously available on any HPE management platform.

iLO Amplifier Pack ties together several other HPE technologies, including: iLO, iLO Federation, Smart Update Tools (SUT or iSUT), Agentless Management Service (AMS), and Support Pack for ProLiant (SPP) into just one easy to use web-based GUI.

By combining these technologies into a simplified, easy to use single pane of glass, iLO Amplifier Pack is able to perform several key operations that reduce time spent managing servers, so that IT can spend more time adding value to the business:

Single dashboard to view the state of all imported servers.

Launch remote KVM console, or power servers on/off.

Update firmware and OS drivers either online or offline.

either online or offline. Scale to up to 10,000 servers*. Supports Rack, Tower, Blade, and Apollo . Gen8, Gen9, and are Gen10 supported.

. Gen8, Gen9, and are Gen10 supported. Update more servers at once, up to 50 . Updates can be batched in a size that you define, to batch updates of more than 50 servers, or to batch fewer than 50 for rolling updates.

. Updates can be batched in a size that you define, to batch updates of more than 50 servers, or to batch fewer than 50 for rolling updates. Automatic or manual Server System Restore new for Gen10 servers, recover servers to a known-good state.

new for Gen10 servers, recover servers to a known-good state. Run basic and detailed inventory reports, as well as baseline compliance and other custom reports.

Set up email and IFTTT altering. Want push notifications sent to your phone, or other notifications besides email? IFTTT is a free integration which enables nearly any notification scheme you can think of. HPE leverages the IFTTT webhooks technology to enable your own, private notification system.

Want push notifications sent to your phone, or other notifications besides email? IFTTT is a free integration which enables nearly any notification scheme you can think of. HPE leverages the IFTTT webhooks technology to enable your own, private notification system. Supports Active Directory authentication.

*This is a soft limit; the highest amount tested and validated by HPE.

Delivered for free as an .OVA, iLO Amplifier Pack offers features based on your iLO licensing level, including the free iLO Standard included with ProLiant servers.

Check out the official user guide for full prerequisites, but iLO Standard/Essentials/Scale Out will enable features such as discovery, inventory, reporting, and core platform firmware updates. iLO Advanced or iLO Advanced Premium Security Edition add iLO repository updating, online updating for firmware, drivers, & HPE software, as well as email & IFTTT alerting. The server recovery feature is exclusive to the new iLO Advanced Premium Security Edition and Gen10 servers.

Server System Restore doesn't get enough credit - yet.

What exactly does this system restore feature do? If you're like me, you probably assumed it would allow you to automatically restore firmware on multiple Gen10 servers from iLO Amplifier Pack, similar to what you could do on individual servers. However, we'd both be mistaken in this case. In fact, iLO Amplifier Pack is also able to use a server baseline that you import as an .ISO in order to build on the firmware recovery feature of iLO 5.

Restore firmware to a known-good state Set BIOS/UEFI options to your configured baseline Mount server baseline .ISO, which covers restoring the OS, applications, and data.

If it's free, it's for me.

By unifying solid management tools like iLO federation, AMS, SUT, and SPP into a single, web-based console that's downloadable for free as an .OVA, HPE has made an excellent move to make server management much more streamlined and efficient. Every ProLiant customer from Gen8 and up can benefit from this new software on some level, and many HPE customers already have iLO Advanced licenses for their ProLiant servers and can access even more functionality, so I'd absolutely encourage everyone to download the .OVA here and see just how easy to use and polished iLO Amplifier Pack is, and how much it really does simplify server management.

If you'd like to test drive the full capabilities of iLO Amplifier Pack, 60 day trial licenses of iLO Advanced can be obtained here: