HPE iLO 6 Essentials to Advanced Upgrade What Changes in the UI

HPE iLO 6 Essentials vs iLO 6 Advanced – Security

When we looked at the Security menu, and then navigated to the Certificate Mappings tab, we again found a banner with the virtues of upgrading our iLO license.

Here with the iLO Essentials license, you can delete the certificates, but to Authorize a New Certificate requires the iLO Advanced license.

There was another license banner in the CAC/Smartcard tab.

Once we upgraded the license we saw the controls to setup CAC Smartcard Authentication.

Next to that was the SSL Certificate tab where the Automatic Certificate Enrollment feature was not present due to the iLO Essentials license level.

Upgrading the license showed us the Automatic Certificate Enrollment feature.

Next to that, there is the Directory tab.

Here the settings were available in iLO Essentials, but the directory services were not enabled until we upgraded to the iLO Advanced level.

On the Encryption tab we saw that we needed an upgraded license to enable the CNSA security state.

Here we entered the license.

Next, let us get to the Management menu.

HPE iLO 6 Essentials vs iLO 6 Advanced – Management

In the Management menu, we saw another licensing feature with the Remote Syslog.

Once we upgraded to iLO Advanced, the Remote Syslog Settings appeared and we could configure the remote server, port, and feature.

Next, was is the Lifecycle Management menu.

HPE iLO 6 Essentials vs iLO 6 Advanced – Lifecycle Management

As part of the Lifecycle Management features, there is a feature to do a one-button secure erase feature.

With iLO Advanced, this feature was enabled.

This may not seem like a big deal, but if you are a MSP, for example, and wanted to re-use a system, you can one button click and securely erase the system per NIST requirements. Also, if you are any organization and simply want the ability to remotely and securely erase a system, this is a nice feature to have.

Final Words

These features may change over time, but at least they give some sense for those who are on the fence of whether they should upgrade from iLO Essentials to iLO Advanced by documenting what we saw. HPE maintains iLO licensing documentation that will be more up-to-date and complete, but this should serve as a guide. We found some interesting items like how our MicroServer Gen11 said that we would get the Power Cap feature in the iLO Essentials banner but then we did not get the feature when we upgraded to iLO Advanced because it was not supported. That means there are differences based on HPE systems between what you will get at different license levels.

Where to Buy

We purchased the iLO Advanced key on eBay (Affiliate Link.)