HP servers come with a powerful out of band management interface called Integrated Lights out, or iLO. It has an extensive web interface and commercially available tools for centrally managing iLO devices and their servers.

But if you want to built your own tooling, integrate iLO management to your existing procedures or simply want to manage iLOs using a command-line interface, you're stuck manually creating XML files and using a perl hack HP ships called locfg.pl.

Enter python-hpilo!

Using the same XML interface as HP's own management tools, here is a python library and command-line tool that make it a lot easier to do all the above. No manual XML writing, just call functions from either python or your shell(script).

Full usage documentation can be found on https://seveas.github.io/python-hpilo/ or in the docs/ directory in the python-hpilo tarball. Here are some examples to wet your appetite:

Getting the chassis IP of a blade server, from python:

>>> ilo = hpilo.Ilo('example-server.int.kaarsemaker.net')
>>> chassis = ilo.get_oa_info()
>>> print chassis['ipaddress']
10.42.128.101

Entering a license key and creating a user, from the shell:

$ hpilo_cli example-server.int.kaarsemaker.net activate_license key=$mykey
$ hpilo_cli example-server.int.kaarsemaker.net add_user user_login=dennis \
            password=hunter2 admin_priv=true

This module is written with compatibility as main priority. Currently supported are:

• All RILOE II/iLO versions up to and including iLO 4
• Python 2.6 or 2.7, and python 3.5 and newer
• Any operating system Python runs on

iLOs can be managed both locally using hponcfg or remotely using the iLO's built-in webserver. In the latter case, the requirements above concern the machine you run this code on, not the managed server.

This software is (c) 2011-2018 Dennis Kaarsemaker [email protected]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

HP, Integrated Lights out and iLO are trademarks of HP, with whom the author of this software is not affiliated in any way other than using some of their hardware.