Automated firmware updates

Building on the Elasticsearch example, we can now build automated updates for iLO firmware.

The example application uses beanstalk and azuki to queue firmware updates and process them with as much parallelism as you want.

Scheduling updates

If you run hpilo_firmware_update, it will query elasticsearch to find iLOs with obsolete firmware and schedule updates. It’s probably most useful to run this command in the same cronjob as the elasticsearch importer to schedule firmware updates as they come in.

Checking the queue

Using the azuki tool, you can check how many iLOs need to be upgraded:

$ azuki stats hpilo-upgrades
hpilo-upgrades
Connections:
    Producers:   0
    Consumers:   1
    Waiting:     0
Jobs:
    Delayed:     0
    Ready:       1
    Urgent:      0
    Reserved:    1
    Buried:      0
    Deleted:     11
    Total:       13

Doing the upgrades

To process the queue, you again use azuki:

$ azuki daemon hpilo-upgrades
INFO:azuki:Waiting for job
Upgrading example-server-1.int.kaarsemaker.net (10.10.10.42) from ilo3 1.70 to ilo3 1.85
...

This will keep running and process new items as they come in. You’ll probably want to run it in screen or tmux so it stays on in the background. If you have lots of iLOs to upgrade, you can start as many instances of this as you want, they will not step on each others toes. I regularly run up to 30 instances in parallel in a tmux session.