I manage a couple of hundred Linux servers, most of which are HP, if they are not virtualized. Historically, we have installed the HP ProLiant Support Pack (PSP) since before I started working here. The PSP comes with usefull (?) stuff like the HP System Management Homepage – which I have never used, but a couple of my colleagues do regularly – and a bunch of drivers.
Some of these drivers, like the iLO kernel module, are not in the stock kernel we use, so it might be useful to install those. Other drivers though, like the cciss and qla2xxx drivers HP supplies, aren't that useful: they are in the stock kernel and have been for quite some time. Overwriting the stock drivers will probably void support from our vendor on several kernel subsystems of not the whole kernel. On the other hand, HP might not support certain issues if you do not use their drivers.
I tend to lean to not installing the HP drivers, but what do you think: is there a tempting reason to install HPs cciss, qla2xxx, e1000, tg3, bnx2 (etc.) drivers and overwriting the drivers provided in the stock kernel package?
Edit: 'tempting reason to install' must be big enough to mitigate the disgusting quality of the packages of the PSP, meaning I have to repackage them all manually in order to be able to install through a centralized method like RH Satellite.
Best Answer
We have lots of Red Hat servers and have considered installing the PSP. The issue always comes down to the errata kernel support by HP versus what's current on Red Hat channels. We had the experience that the Red Hat version of the drivers was more up to date than the one provided by PSP. On another occasion the PSP limited us to a version of an errata kernel, which didn't make us very happy about it. Now, there been times where Red Hat didn't logged messages for issues with the hardware. Which is pretty bad on production servers, having servers go down or hang without any information or logs of the cause is not fun. At this point we have a hybrid, we've picked the packages that don't need an specific kernel version to work; like hp-health, hpacucli and the monitoring such. I think if HP/Red Hat and the rest are so tight, they should work together and include them on the Red Hat distribution. Is nonsense that there is even a support pack independent of the distribution itself.