We are using HP DL ProLiant Servers Generation 5, 6, and 7 models for our vSphere environment. Has anyone had any experience with using the HP provided ISO vs VMware? :smileyconfused:
I have been using the VMware provided images and for moving to ESXi 5.0U1, I am trying to determine whether to use HP's images now.
Any suggestions, comments, and or PROs or CONs would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you !
Like the others said, the HP provided ISO is fine but it's in no way a magical requirement. They only contain few updated driver-VIBs and additionally the hardware management extensions.
Basically, everything HP and other hardware vendors do with their custom ISOs is grabbing the general vanilla release by VMware, adding in a few separate packages (hardware management extensions) and maybe replace some specific drivers with updated versions (like a newer be2net driver, which is just what VMware provides as a separate updated driver on their site anyways). They do not touch any of the VMware-components like esx-base package
You can also easily build an almost exact copy of the HP image yourself, the updated/additional drivers and management extensions are all publicly available after all. And of course you can always install the management bundles and updated drivers in your vanilla install yourself afterwards, via Update Manager for example.
your hp provided isos contain vibs that may not otherwise be on the standard iso.
if you have HP hardware the hp provided iso is the way to go.
the hp image works fine - if you don't use it then you will want to install the hp offline bundle, so that you get the uptodate management agents, and etc ...
Like the others said, the HP provided ISO is fine but it's in no way a magical requirement. They only contain few updated driver-VIBs and additionally the hardware management extensions.
Basically, everything HP and other hardware vendors do with their custom ISOs is grabbing the general vanilla release by VMware, adding in a few separate packages (hardware management extensions) and maybe replace some specific drivers with updated versions (like a newer be2net driver, which is just what VMware provides as a separate updated driver on their site anyways). They do not touch any of the VMware-components like esx-base package
You can also easily build an almost exact copy of the HP image yourself, the updated/additional drivers and management extensions are all publicly available after all. And of course you can always install the management bundles and updated drivers in your vanilla install yourself afterwards, via Update Manager for example.