Support Pack for ProLiant (SPP) is the official HPE distribution of updates to the ProLiant family of server. It is an ISO image, which customers typically download from HPE website. Once locally available it can be mounted on a ProLiant server and booted from, in order to update the system software of the server such as the BIOS, component firmware and OS drivers. It can also be used in combination with HPE Smart Update Manager (HPSUM). The releases are named after their release date so for example find SPP2016.10.0.iso for a SPP released in October 2016. HPE OneView also offers the capability of leveraging this ISO image, by loading it as a new "baseline" for automatic systems updates. This article describes how to script this operation. More on the SPP web site http://h17007.www1.hpe.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/products/service\_pack/spp/index.aspx

Managing servers at scale

SPP ISO images can be mounted and booted on a single server in order to upgrade its components. That is ok for a couple of servers but will become a very tedious and time-consuming operation when managing hundreds of servers in a datacenter. A more comprehensive way to use the SPP is to combine it with HPE OneView. HPE OneView offers the option to load a SPP and to use it as a property of a server profile.

Server Profile

Before we look at how to load SPP into HPE OneView, let us review what a server profile is. Server Profile is the most important concept in HPE OneView. It represents the abstraction layer, which isolates a workload from the underlying server-hardware on which it runs. The server-profile artifact is the place where we setup BIOS settings, hardware type, and number of network connections, SAN attachments, number and size of disks for a given workload. We can create many of these server profiles, and even create server profile templates, and these remain completely disconnected from the hardware until finally applied to an available compute resource. When this happens, properties of the profile are applied to the designated server hardware, connections are made to the network infrastructure, and disks are carved automatically. One of the property of a server profile (or a server profile template) is the Firmware Baseline. The picture below shows options available for managing firmware baseline during the creation of a server profile.

So if a server profile also has the Firmware property set to a given baseline, this baseline will automatically be installed on the server hardware as part of the profile deployment. This offline technique (there are other online methods for applying firmware, using SUT - Smart Update Tool) removes a lot of complexity for server administrators. It adds a lot more flexibility too, as it allows to validate and apply certain SPP to given workloads, and other SPP to other workloads, as this is just another property of a server profile.

Custom SPP

It is important to note that, while HPE provides its customers with regular updates of the SPP ISO images, it is possible to build custom SPP. With this technique, you can create smaller ISO images, for example by selecting only components, which exist in the customer's datacenter. More information on custom SPP on https://spp.hpe.com/custom/

Loading SPP in HPE OneView

In order to get an SPP to appear in the list of available SPP to choose from for server profile, it needs to be loaded in HPE OneView. The obvious and GUI-based option to do this is in HPE OneView Web Console Firmware Bundles page, as shown below:

From there it is possible to load additional Firmware Bundle from SPP ISO images.

Automating it

Another approach to achieve this is to use PowerShell and the HPE OneView library for PowerShell, which we discussed in the previous post There is a couple of PowerShell commandlets in the library to deal with Firmware Bundles. We have:

• Get-HPOVBaseline

• Add-HPOVBaseline

• Remove-HPOVBaseline

There are several possible scenario to automate the management of baselines. For example, we could:

1. Permanently monitor the create/delete file in a given folder and add or remove ISO images as they show up. We can use the System.IO.FileSystemWatcher PowerShell object to achieve this

2. Look for the files in a repository and compare with the baselines already loaded and keep them in synch

3. Simply load ISO images from disk

To keep things simple we will implement option 3, as it requires less PowerShell code. The steps of the scripts are the following:

• Importing the HPE OneView library

Import-module HPEOneView.200

• Connect to a given HPE OneView Appliance (if not already connected)

if (!$global:myAppliance) {
    $global:myAppliance = Read-Host "HPE OneView FQDN or IP address"
}
if ($global:ConnectedSessions.Name -notcontains $global:myAppliance) {
    $connection=Connect-HPOVMgmt -appliance $global:myAppliance -User
    administrator -password 
 }

• Enumerate Firmware Bundles already on appliance

$bundlesloaded = get-hpovbaseline
write-host "Found the following baseline on appliance"
foreach ($item in $bundlesloaded) { write-host " - "
$item.isoFilename}

• Enumerate ISO images in current folder

$filesinfolder = get-item \*.iso
write-host "Found the following ISO in folder"
foreach ($item in $filesinfolder) { write-host " - " $item.Name}

• Ask for confirmation

Write-Host "Ok to upload ISO files on disk to appliance (Y/N)?"
$key = $Host.UI.RawUI.ReadKey("NoEcho, IncludeKeyDown")
if ($key.Character -ne "Y") { write-host You wimp! ; break }

• And start uploading

foreach ($item in $filesinfolder) {
write-host "Uploading file" $item.name "to appliance"
$task=add-hpovbaseline $item.name
$t = Wait-HPOVTaskComplete $task.uri -timeout (New-TimeSpan -Minutes 30)
}

• Terminate

Write-Host "Done!"
Write-Host "Disconnecting..."
disconnect-hpovmgmt

Putting it all together

It is now time to save this PowerShell script and test it against an HPE OneView Appliance or a HPE Synergy Composer.

Before we run our script, let us check the appliance baseline view (empty to start with):

In our first run, we can say Y(es) to confirm upload:

After the run, we can check in HPE OneView again, to see that the baseline is now loaded

In the second run, we are notified that baseline is already there. We can just say N(o) to exit:

> **Note: be careful as HPE OneView modifies the filename of the bundle > by replacing unwanted characters such as "." and spaces, by "_"