Controlling HP ProLiant DL380 G6/G7 fan speed

fanhardwarehphp-proliant

I'm having fan speeds and noise level issues from my most recent batch of HP ProLiant DL380 G7 servers. Most of the systems are nearly silent with low fan speeds (as reported by hplog -f). The majority of systems causing issues are running an operating system that cannot accommodate the HP Insight Management agents or drivers (NexentaStor 3.1). I also have a few CentOS servers running the HP drivers that have the same issue. Some of these systems have 2 or more PCIe cards installed.

Is there any way to force a lower fan speed on these servers? I've seen the advisory on the BIOS cooling option. I'm more curious about the random nature of the issue and if there's any means to control this via software.

Best Answer

You can set a power policy via the iLO configuration. By setting the CPU power modes to lower settings, the fans may also spin down accordingly.

Related Solutions

HP Insight Manager setup and use case

This may be similar to my other question about specific use-cases of HP SIM at: https://serverfault.com/questions/284004/integrating-hp-systems-insight-manager-into-an-existing-environment

Either way, HP Systems Insight Manager is free and available from:
http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/hpsim/download.html

You can access ILO interfaces detected on your network from one place. HP SIM will also associate the ILO interfaces with the physical servers for you.

The software should probably run on its own Windows (or Linux) server, but for the size of the environment you're describing, it can run in a VM. Here are the minimum hardware specs from the Quickspecs page:

Any HP ProLiant with the following configuration:

Minimum: 1.5-GHz processor with 4GB RAM (for x86) / 6GBRAM (for x64)
1 GB free disk space recommended
Recommended: 2.4-GHz processor with 6GB RAM ( for x86) / 8GB RAM(for x64)

As for monitoring VMs, HP SIM is aware of VMWare ESX and ESXi and will display information about VMs discovered on your host servers. The HP-specific ESXi version will show hardware status and won't require any agents. They've already been integrated into the ESXi build.

**A note on the ESXi builds. I don't believe you'll get full hardware health info from any systems earlier than a G5. You won't be able to get ESXi 4 to run on the G3 servers (not 64-bit capable).

Installing Windows on HP Proliant Servers without SmartStart

You should use HP's solution named Rapid Deployment Pack which is part of HP Insight Control

It's exact purpose is deploying various OS to HP Proliant servers.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

HP Insight Manager setup and use case

Installing Windows on HP Proliant Servers without SmartStart

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