A recent Sun BigAdmin paper provides readers with an Overview of Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM). The paper describes ILOM as an advanced service processor used to manage and monitor Sun servers. ILOM includes dedicated hardware and firmware that is preinstalled on a variety of Sun x64-based Sun Fire servers, Sun Blade Modular Systems, and Sun Blade server modules, as well as on some SPARC-based servers. ILOM is a vital management tool in the data center and can be integrated with other enterprise data center management tools already installed on user systems.

Sun is currently transitioning many systems to support ILOM, which will enable users to have a single, consistent and standards-based service processor (SP) across Sun's product lines. This will give customers:

• Consistent system management interfaces for operators
• Rich protocol and standards support
• Broadening third-party management support
• System management functions integrated into Sun servers at no extra cost

As the paper explains, ILOM enables users to actively manage and monitor the server independently of the operating system state, resulting in a reliable Lights Out Management (LOM) system. The ILOM SP runs a dedicated embedded operating system and a dedicated Ethernet port, which jointly provide out-of-band management capability. Users can also access ILOM from several Sun supported operating systems (the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS), Linux or Microsoft Windows) on the server host. Using ILOM, users can remotely manage a server as if they were using a locally attached keyboard, monitor and mouse.

Furthermore, ILOM lets users monitor and manage systems proactively by viewing hardware configurations, monitoring system information, managing system alerts, controlling system power usage and more.

Whenever users power up their servers, ILOM is automatically initialized, providing a full-featured, browser-based web interface and equivalent command-line interface. It also provides industry-standard interfaces for SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) and IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), which can be integrated with other management tools and processes, such as the following third-party management tools that might already be working with the servers:

• IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console
• Microsoft Operations Manager
• HP OpenView Operations for UNIX
• HP Systems Insight Manager
• CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management
• BMC PATROL Enterprise Manager

The paper includes a table that shows the current status of some Sun platforms and their support of ILOM. Sun plans to release additional x64-based and SPARC-based systems that support ILOM during the current and following years.

As mentioned above, when the sever is powered on, ILOM is automatically initialized. Users can then log in to ILOM through a console connection to the serial management port on the server or Chassis Monitoring Module (CMM), or through an Ethernet connection to the network management port on the server or CMM.

For information about ILOM features and procedures on how to use the ILOM functions, look for these documents:

• Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager 2.0 User’s Guide (820-1188)
• ILOM Supplement for Sun Blade 6220 Server Module (820-0047)
• ILOM Supplement for Sun Fire X4500 Server (819-4361)
• ILOM Supplement for Sun Fire X4100/X4100 M2 and X4200/X4200 M2 Servers (819-5464)
• Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager 2.0 Supplement for SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 Servers (820-2180)

Additional information about Sun's system management tools.

Sun also continues to test and develop third-party system management tools so that users can easily integrate Sun systems within an existing system management environment. [...read more...]

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