HP Proliant 380 G4 iLO stuck in recovery mode

I believe that you need to weigh up the pro's and cons of the sharing the hardware.

Sharing the NIC would allow you to save a little bit of money on your colo costs which is a good thing, however by going down a shared ILO route you should consider:

1. Utilisation of the first NIC, if you have a heavy network load how will you access the server via the ILO? If you have a separate NIC then you have the full bandwidth to use to access the server remotely.
2. A hardware failure of the first NIC will also nix your ability to remotely manage the server, this may not be something that matters much to you but in my experience (With Dell iDRAC cards) having the second NIC is a benefit when things go really wrong.

At the end of the day I can't give concrete advice, its just a decision you need to make based on your business needs and available funds.

When you first turn the server on, there's a a section during startup that says "Push F8 to enter iLO Configuration" (might be some other function key). Do that and fill in the network information and setup a login.

Once that's done, open a web browser at your computer and enter the IP you configured. It should be very self explanatory from there.

The iLO configuration is not stored on disk, and not in the BIOS, so there's a decent chance it isn't clear. Also, how your VPN works and how to use it is completely outside the scope of using iLO.