Recently (yesterday as I write this), HPE released ILO Amplifier Pack 1.60, which **should** be a seamless automatic upgrade from 1.55, but for me it’s been anything but seamless.  Every single ILO Amplifier Pack 1.55 instance I have across all my clients have failed with “System Update Failed” (and no further details) while installing the update, and each have sent this extra helpful message via email:

A call to Proactive Care support and to a couple of my peers indicates I’m not the only one with this issue.  And unfortunately, HPE has moved all the development of ILO Amplifier Pack out of Houston to India, so my normal contacts in Houston were also out of the know.

It was at this point I decided I should (heaven forbid!) read the documentation for 1.60, and I found this handy little tip buried at the back of the release notes:

Yeah – thanks ILO Amplifier Pack dev team – great work – that’s some pretty solid code you have there in version 1.5x / 1.60…  Solution 1 wasn’t the answer since the appliances already had https access to the midway services.   On to solution 2…

The first problem with solution 2 is finding the full download for the install.  To do that, you need to go back to the original download page for the ILO Amplifier Pack and re-register.  The link is:    https://iloamplifierpack.itcs.hpe.com/

And this handy because you’ll also need the new registration key they send you shortly if you didn’t keep your original one!

The next step is backing up the existing installation.  Now I don’t who thought this was a great idea, but there are only two way back up the ILO Amplifier Pack…  Either you plug a FAT32 formatted USB key into the hypervisor and pass that through to the VM, or you backup to a NFS share.  I don’t know about you – but I don’t keep USB keys plugged into my ESXi hosts, and we are a Microsoft / VMware shop, so NFS isn’t readily available.

ILO Amplifier Pack dev team – if you are reading this, it would have been so simple to add a download button here…

Considering almost all my customers servers are located in abandoned offices with no staff present thanks to COVID-19, the USB key option was out of the question.  That leaves NFS.

I ended up using haneWIN NFS Server (https://www.hanewin.net/nfs-e.htm) which I had purchased a license of many years ago.  It’s also available as a 30 day evaluation trial, so it would probably do fine for you just for this, but I’d really encourage you to purchase a full license as it’s only 29.00 EUR, so it won’t break the bank and you never know when you might need it again (you could even use it to help PXE boot a SPP)!

Once you have haneWIN NFS Server downloaded (I’m using the application version, not the service version), extract it and launch nfssrv-64.exe.  Select Preferences from the Edit drop-down menu.

Go to the Exports tab and enable “Map client root (UID 0) to root for all entries”.  Then click “Edit exports file”.

Delete the 5 example entries at the bottom and then add:

C:\TEMP\nfsd\ILOAMPPACK\ -name:nfs -alldirs

In my case, I’m using C:\TEMP\nfsd\ILOAMPPACK\ as the root of the NFS folder and it’s where I plan to drop the ILO Amplifier Pack (**note** – you need to manually create this path!).  Click Save, then Apply, then Ok.

Now log into your original ILO Amplifier Pack and at the bottom of the Configuration and Settings menu, you will find Backup and Restore.

It should default to the Backup tab.  From here, select NFS from the dropdown box, enter the NFS server’s IP address and path (/nfs), along with a filename for the backup and a password for the backup, and then click Backup Now

If everything worked correctly you should see Backup successful.

Checking the backup folder, you should find your backup file.

Now you can go ahead shutdown the old ILO Amplifier Pack virtual machine and deploy a new one based on the 1.60 image.  Ironically – when you boot the new ILO Amplifier Pack VM, you’ll be given an option “to restore settings from a USB” (exact words).  A USB what I don’t know… 🙂   Where the heck is NFS at?  Come on!  Again – ILO Amplifier Pack dev team – if you are reading this, fix this…

Select Initial Setup and give the new appliance the same settings as the old one…  Log into the WebUI and activate it.  Now go to the Configuration and Settings menu, and select Backup and Restore.  Click on the restore tab this time and enter the same settings you did when you made the backup, then click the Restore Now button.

After a few seconds, your browser should generate an error that its unable to connect to the server, and you should see the VM rebooting.

Once it comes back up after a few minutes, your configuration should be restored and you should be good to go!

And as always:

Use any tips, tricks, or scripts I post at your own risk.