The October release of HP’s Service Pack for ProLiant (SPP) has been released and is available for download. New to the SPP concept? These are roughly quarterly releases of all the new driver and firmware goodness needed to keep your HP environment updated and compliant. The SPP contents are delivered to your environment via the Smart Update Manager, currently at version 5, and is free for download and consumption.

Being one who commonly has to do upgrades in a variety of environments, I can easily state that HP’s Smart Update Manager (SUM), which leverages the SPP as a repository for updates, is one of the easiest and efficient update utilities in enterprise IT. And let’s face it – maintenance is an often overlooked experience that has a real financial impact on operations. If your team has to rely on tribal knowledge or professional services to keep the environment updated there is a larger chance for a miscommunication and/or an outage.

And realistically, having a solid update process is a win-win. HP has less support related activities (tickets, cases, calls, on site visits, etc.) because the updater is solid, and customers enjoy a tool that makes the process simple and “just works”. I credit the recent wave of inspiration that has washed over the teams at HP as part of the “Gen8” release of products and software for getting SUM where it is today.

Read my original post on the release of Smart Update Manager version 5 while at HP Discover 2012

This post will go over some of the release notes, improvements, and fixes that are a part of the latest SPP.

What’s New With The 2012.10.0 SPP Release

According to the “HP Service Pack for ProLiant 2012.10.0 Release Notes” there are various improvements and fixes. I’m pleasantly surprised to see support for Windows Server 2012 already on the list.

• Added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2012
• Added offline support for HP Diagnostics and Array Configuration Utility (ACU)
• Updated to HP Smart Update Manager 5.3.0
  • Added custom baseline functionality
  • Reports in CSV format
  • Scheduled web downloads to repository

You can see a video of me walking through SUM 5.3.0 below (or on my YouTube channel – make sure to subscribe!)

Smart Update Manager 5.3.0 Improvements

Changes bundled with version 5.3.0 of SUM are listed below (Release Notes here).

Enhancements

• Linux RPM support
• Fibre Channel switch firmware update support (B-series and H-series only)
• Microsoft Windows Server 2012 support
• Support for HP Integrity I/O card online firmware updates
• Tool to create a custom baseline
• Create reports in CSV format
• Schedule pull from web repository downloads (not applicable to Fibre Channel switches)
• Support for 16G Fibre Channel QLogic HBA
• The ability to use the UNC format to identify file paths

Fixes