Datacenter / Cloud Service hardware is a race to the bottom, we want simplicity and ability to work with off-the-shelf and widely available tools (Redfish (cURL), IPMI (freeipmi, openipmi, ipmitool)) so we can integrate these things into our hardware management platforms.
In this world, the legacy vendors like Dell and HP feel like they have to differentiate their hardware somehow, or they lose all the margin. So they'll charge you for all those "value-add" things like KVM or OOB Firmware Updates, because they can't make money on the machines themselves anymore.
The irony is all that extra garbage they add to their servers is exactly the opposite of what you want at high scale and really only serves the "enterprise" market that tends to deploy VMware and hand-manage servers and need point-and-click stuff since there's no incentive to write software to manage small environments like that.
Yes, and as essentially a "hidden flat tax" it burns a lot more for large quantities of lower end hardware vs single bigger iron. Looking back at the records, at the time adding their iLO/M.2 comm card (needed to have a dedicated iLO port on those servers) was $65 from Provantage and then the license to actually do basic stuff with it like a web console was and $227. So ~$290 all told extra. We've got a few higher end systems, $10-20k NAS or larger hypervisor systems, and at that level sure an extra $300 stings a bit but is against a lot of other stuff. At medium range, more like $3k-5k, obviously worse. But some use cases called for say 6x $500-600 systems instead of a single $3k-6k system, and for a few projects someone was trying to go as cheap as possible and grabbed some still pretty new (gen10) plain vanilla ones off of used/bankruptcy sales for like $300-400 because the price seemed so attractive. But then using iLO properly could nearly double the price, and at the lower end there is a big difference in the hardware you can get for $600-700 vs $300-400, and then multiply that per unit.
Meanwhile competitor systems all have dedicated ports out of box. SuperMicro does have a paid "full unlock" for their BMC, but the only thing it does is add bios updates and such. All the core normal management functionality is there by default. It also only costs $30.
Granted HPs had other irritations like really wonky proprietary fan control (heck, proprietary fan cables too) that would mysteriously fail to function with different flavors of the same OS, and couldn't be overridden from the BMC (then what's the point!?). Also they were slow with EPYC options when that's what a lot of us really wanted to be switching for, the performance and value propositions were getting really good vs Intel who were also jerks.
Like lots of big players the experience may get different if you're buying hundreds to thousands or more units and have a dedicated account manager who takes care of all this for you etc etc. But x86-based servers is a pretty damn competitive market and at some point one has to stop and ask why hours are being burned futzing with stuff when literally the entire basic point of getting "server class" hardware with remote management functionality is to save man hours by NOT having to futz. So yeah there's a little rant I didn't even know I still had in me years later :). HP you silly goofs.
