Integrated Lights-Out, or iLO, is a proprietary embedded server management technology by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise which provides out-of-band management facilities. The physical connection is an Ethernet port that can be found on most ProLiant servers and microservers[1] of the 300 and above series.
iLO has similar functionality to the lights out management (LOM) technology offered by other vendors, for example, Sun/Oracle's LOM port, Dell DRAC, the IBM Remote Supervisor Adapter and Cisco CIMC.
iLO makes it possible to perform activities on an HP server from a remote location. The iLO card has a separate network connection (and its own IP address) to which one can connect via HTTPS. Possible options are:
iLO provides some other utilities virtual power and a remote console. iLO is either embedded on the system board, or available as a PCI card.
iLO is embedded or available on some HP ProLiant and Integrity servers.
Prior to iLO, Compaq created several other lights out management products. The original was the Remote Insight Board (RIB), which was available as an EISA or PCI expansion card. RIB was replaced with RILOE (Remote Insight Light-Out Edition), which was only available for PCI. The original RILOE was replaced with RILOE II. HP stopped manufacturing RILOE II in 2006. The final firmware version for RILOE is 2.53(A) dated 9 Mar 2004 and for RILOE II is 1.21 dated 5 July 2006.
For some older ProLiant 100 series servers there is a "Lights Out 100" option, which has more limited functionality. The LO100 is a traditional IPMI BMC, and does not share hardware or firmware with iLO. Newer ProLiant 100 series servers have a standard iLO.
There is also a version of iLO for HP Moonshot systems referred to as iLO Chassis Management which is often abbreviated as iLO CM. The Chassis Management version of iLO was derived from iLO 4.[7] As of June 2018 the most recent Chassis Manager Firmware available is version 1.56 which was released as part of the Moonshot Component Pack 2018.02.0.[8]
Although HP included iLO functionality in the ProLiant Gen8 MicroServer, they removed it from the Gen10 version. The ProLiant MicroServer Gen10+ has an iLO add-on card.
There have been multiple generations of iLO, each generation noted by a single digit number ("iLO 2"). Some generations of iLO are segmented into different editions, based on what features are licensed.[9] iLO includes updatable firmware, for which HP periodically releases new versions.
| Name | Servers | Latest Firmware |
|---|---|---|
| iLO[10] | ProLiant G2, G3, G4, and G6 (model numbers under 300) | 1.96 released 30 April 2014[11] |
| iLO 2[12] | ProLiant G4, G5, and G6 (model numbers 300 and higher) | 2.33 released 30 March 2018[13] |
| iLO 3[14] | ProLiant G7 | 1.94 released 17 December 2020[15] |
| iLO 4[16] | ProLiant Gen8 and Gen9 | 2.82 released 2 March 2023[17] |
| iLO 5[18] | ProLiant Gen10 and Gen10 Plus[19] | 3.03 released 27 March 2024[20] |
| iLO 6[21] | ProLiant Gen11 | 1.58 released 27 March 2024[22] |
Several tools or APIs exist for interacting with HP iLO:
iLO 4 introduced a HTTP API to manage the functionality.
This served as the inspiration for the Redfish standard developed by the DMTF, which is implemented in iLO 5. It can be managed in an industry standard way, by all Redfish compatible tools. However, since Redfish allows the vendors to add custom functionality to their Redfish API, HPE forked the DMTF's tools and included additional functionality.
In December 2021 Iranian researchers at Amnpardaz security firm have discovered rootkits in HPs iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) management modules.[28][29]