Insight Control is really an operational environment. If you are familiar with the free "Systems Insight Manager" or "SIM"; IC extends the functionality of SIM by allowing you to do additional tasks. Like P2P/P2V/V2P conversions, dynamic power capping, advancement power management/monitoring, automated replacment of servers with spare blades (if using Virtual Connect), automated server deployment, etc. Often times the blade chassis is sold with Insight Control licensing to begin with (although you can buy without). So you may want to check around to see if you've got license keys or anything on your order. You would need to setup a physical or virtual server to run the SIM environment; Insight Control then adds extended functionality on top of SIM. If nothing else you can still stand up a SIM server for free and get some cool monitoring, patching (SPP), and alerting features.
If you buy HP rack servers and are buying ILO Advanced then the Insight Control license for those servers isn't a whole lot more and includes ILO Advanced.
This may help explain the benefits of Insight Control a little better
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/serv ... index.htmlSIM
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/serv ... index.html