Am 01.07.2013 um 20:39 schrieb John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com:
On 7/1/2013 11:30 AM, Nathan Duehr wrote:
The significant problem we ran into was someone at an upstream vendor orders HP stuff via individual part numbers in a specific configuration for us, so we get a server, some disks, whatever... and assemble them on-site. They didn't know (bad vendor, no donut) about the change or spaced it... and didn't send licenses... so you're sitting there with disks in a new server, all ready to load the OS as usual... and the OS can't find any disks.
that sounds like a VAR problem. if I'm buying from a VAR, I expect the system to arrive as ordered and configured.
As we buy direct from HP (big corp), I *ALWAYS* go through the entire 'quickspec' page on any HP gear, carefully studying the options and SKU's, any such licenses should be clear there. For example, I *always* get the full ILO license.
Somebody correct me, but the B320 controller only comes in the "e"-type models of DL3x0 servers, right? We only order the "p" models and we generally don't need to enter licenses to access hard-drives, unless we want to create a RAID6…
They are nice machines, but I'm not sure if they are worth the price - as we don't do Windows and don't install the HP-agents, most of the feature that these agents offer go unused (but paid-for).
The good thing about them is that spares are available very long and work through different generations (Gen8 is the first since G5 that changed almost everything).
I'm not 100% sure, but I believe, with SuperMicro Servers, I'd have to have a much larger (and better organized) inventory of spares that might only fit into specific age-group of servers…