HPE BladeSystem Reviews

Here are the valuable hardware and software features:

Hardware:

• Multi-generational blade system which supports all the way from Gen1 to Gen9 without a forklift upgrade or keeping old enclosures around.
• Up to 16 servers of varying physical sizes (half and full height) allowed in a single enclosure.
• Multiple scalable backplane options (including 16Gb Brocade fiber switches and 10Gbe Cisco Fabric Extenders) to ensure optimal redundancy and interoperability with other datacenter hardware.
• Allows the use of network defined architectures without the need for additional training.
• Allows storage admins, server admins, and network admins access to each component without additional cost or delay due to lack of familiarity.
• Multiple power options: Single and three phase power for different datacenter layouts.
• Versatile with optional virtual connect module to enhance east/west traffic flow for virtualization, reducing unnecessary north and south traffic.

Software:

• Onboard Administrator
• Insight Control
• HPE OneView

This solution has improved our organization as follows:

• Ease of management and configuration through a single pane of glass for up to 16 blade servers.
• Leveraging the Onboard Administrator for control over troubled servers without the need for physical access to the servers.
• Ability to reset blade server fuses remotely if they become completely unresponsive. Removes the need for many calls to a datacenter for support.
• OneView has taken this a step further with newer generation blades. This cannot be leveraged on the blades older than Gen7.

The Onboard Administrator (OA) is the heart of C7000 enclosure management, it integrates advanced health and monitoring to the point of even iLo launching through the OA to KVM a blade server that is not responsive. There are two OA modules, one active, the other passive.

HPE contacted us after identifying the serial number of our active OA module was in a critical recall list.

While all components are redundant including two Cisco Fabric Extenders (Fex) for Network Connectivity of the blade servers (Our config is 4 x 10 Gbe per Fabric Extender teamed with the second Fabric Extender through Virtual Port Channel). A single OA replacement caused 15 servers with VPC protection to be dropped off the network when the device was failed from active to passive; completely disrupting 200+ VMs and >2000 users; all when it was assured to failover gracefully.

If I was to physically disconnect all cables in one Fex, or even remove it from a blade enclosure it would operate fine, but for some reason, the bad OA module caused a network reset to occur which eliminated all redundancy on the link.

For more information on VPC to elaborate it’s power, flexibility and resilience, please see the following links: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/p...
http://www.netcraftsmen.com/ho...

We have been using this solution for nine years, through different revisions.

We only had a stability issue with a defective OA Module. Other than that, most blade servers have only seen odd failures on hard drives or RAID batteries on older generations.

The super capacitor in newer generations seems even more resilient. No critical outages have occurred at a blade enclosure level in over nine years of use with c7000 generations, other than a single defective OA module.

There was a legendary update on the chassis itself, in a mission critical ERP/Citrix environment.

We have never reached a threshold on scalability with the c7000. With multiple I/O interconnects on the backplane, we have never maxed out its capabilities.

I recommend having Proactive Care Advanced Support or Datacenter Care on any critical datacenter infrastructure. When leveraging this level of support, we have had great results hitting the advanced resolution center.

The Proactive Care and above coverage also grants you a TAM and quarterly health checks including intimate knowledge of your environment, interoperability of your firmware versions, and recommendations to avoid potential conflicts.

The tool was up in two hours, fully migrating blades from old to new c7000 included to this timing. Fiber zoning and ethernet configuration is a breeze. As long as you know your products from the last generation, it’s quite intuitive.

Always ensure that you purchase the Insight Control Suite. This will ensure all current and future blades are licensed for iLO and other features. This will ensure ease of use and configuration.

We evaluated IBM BladeCenter and HPE BladeCenter M1000 Series.

It is quite easy to setup, configure, and get fully into production. This is the case even when physically migrating old blades from an old c7000 to a newer c7000 chassis. That can happen in less than two hours.

When placed on the same fiber fabric and properly utilizing aliases, these are completely hot swappable between chassis. This is super-efficient and smooth on the transitions and decommissioning of the older chassis.

Be warned: Even though G1 servers are supported, having a 2Gb fiber card in the old G1 servers will cause them to be non-functional with new 16Gb fiber switches. This is not an HP issue, but rather a limitation of legacy fiber. Plan appropriately when upgrading older technology!

• Easy to add new blades
• No additional cabling required for network or FC
• Nice single point of management
• Easy portal

It has given us a much reduced server footprint with a subsequent reduction in cabling and a lower carbon footprint.

• Ability to zoom in on the blade system graphic
• Easy way of reporting all the blades at once

This has been in use for three years.

In three years, we have not had any issues with enclosures nor with server instability.

We have had no issues with scalability. We have added ProLiant servers to the chassis which shares storage.

Technical support is great, once you get to it

We previously had rack-mounted HP-UX servers. Our hardware refresh dictated that we move to blade systems in order to keep using HP-UX systems.

It was a very straightforward migration.

Ensure that you use virtual connect modules. It is well worth the extra cost over traditional switches.

Always go for virtual connect modules from the outset.

The virtual connect side of networking and the manageability through that is by far the biggest win for us. The blades come and go as racks do, but the virtualization back of it means a lot less hands on and a lot more manageability.

The biggest benefit is the minimum downtime due to the programmatic nature of the whole thing.

There’s nothing that I don't already know is coming out.

We've had them for quite a few years now. Early on it was a bit hit and miss, but more recently it has become far more stable.

We have not gone full scale with it. We only have it in small areas of the data center at the moment.

We have not used technical support.

We knew we needed a new solution because our data center costs were rising on our racks and we just had to slimline down into a more compact solution.

The early stages weren't as smooth as they should have been. I was involved in the initial setup and it was complex because of the nature we wanted to use it in; a very virtualized network and storage capacity. It wasn't quite straightforward and it meant a great deal of complex planning to make sure we got it right in the first place and the initial setup didn't cause problems later on.

We also looked at Dell solutions.

When selecting a vendor, reputation and pricing are most important.

Spend as much time as possible planning before you go anywhere near it.

I get the same level of service and perspective for everything. It is a generic experience with respect to what it's used for.

I would like to see all-around fulfillment availability from top to bottom in terms of features. I guess the answer is higher availability.

The stability is pretty good. I'd say it's on par with other vendors in the same category.

It scales fine for tens of thousands of things.

I can’t comment on things that I'm not supposed to.

We were using a multitude of vendors with comparable differences.

We considered the typical ones, the big three: IBM, HPE, and Dell.

I needed a solution because of my economies of scale. I had the demand and a business need.

I would advise colleagues not to rush into settling on a solution. When we were choosing a vendor, we considered price, performance, availability, and engagement.

The BladeSystems come with 16 blades in one chassis. This gives us a central location to manage all our HPE blade servers. We already apply a virtualization hypervisor layer on it, like Microsoft.

I would especially like to see a hyperconverged solution from HPE. With technology becoming faster and faster, and everything going to the cloud, I think cyber convergence is very good.

I’m fine, you know. I think there is no need to improve it.

Honestly, it's very stable. There have been no issues with it during the past five years. It's very, very good. That’s why we would like to expand our data center now to buy many enclosures to accommodate the demands of what we have right now.

It is scalable. I think that it is like HPE Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager Software. You can configure the network from a central location for all enclosures. We have more than four or five enclosures. That is very good for us. 

That's why I would recommend having one stack of vendor products. For example, we have HPE blade servers, some network devices, and some switches. This way, you can integrate and monitor the health status for all enclosures from a single monitor. You are alerted if any failure occurs. That makes our life easier in IT; so it's good.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but my colleague says that it was good.

We compared HPE blade servers with Cisco blade servers. Cisco is good, but expensive. I don’t have experience with them, but one of my friends has it. Later, they decided to go with HPE. 

From our perspective in IT, you should look for the solution which fits your needs. It doesn't matter who the vendor is; but if you go with HPE, they have a lot of good experience in data centers. 

We decided to go with HPE blades and enclosures. They are very powerful and they fit our needs. HPE fits our needs, especially because they also have the back-end storage, like 3PAR. 

I recommend having a full stack with a single vendor, so you only have to deal with one company for support.

Now our company is thinking about buying new servers. It's called HPE Apollo, I think. It's in progress. It's very good. I hope we will get more experience with HPE, especially from a training perspective.

We were looking for stability. It's very powerful. It has huge resources. You can customize it as you like, and it fits our needs. Of course, it takes up little space. It's one rack in which you can put three enclosures. You can build your entire data center in one rack. It's very good. 

Since I joined my current organization four years ago, HPE did an amazing transformation of our data center. Everything there is an HPE product from A to Z. It's an end-to-end solution, including the hardware, networking, software, and everything. We are very comfortable with it. In five years, we haven’t faced any issues with it. It's very good.

We migrated our entire legacy landscape from old HP Superdome infrastructure to the new x86 infrastructure on blades. In terms of application portability, it was a seamless project from my side.

The main benefit has been in terms of the newer platform having much more computer power. You can see your workloads completing much quicker. Users with feedback in terms of workload performance have reported that a job that typically took 3 or 4 hours to run took a few minutes.

We're busy with phase 2 of the project. We classify the legacy landscape into simple, medium and complex applications. We've done the simple and medium. We're now going to tackle the complex and will make use of HPE professional services to see how we can either modernize the application code, for which we don't have the skill set anymore, or some subset of the applications.

In terms of platform stability, the legacy infrastructure was out of warranty and out of support. The new platform was much more stable and reliable.

We have not used technical support often. HPE worked closely with us on the project. It was a joint initiative. We never had any issues and customers didn't even know they were migrated.

We're a telecom company. We've standardized around HPE, IBM, Oracle Solaris Sun boxes and now we've got VCE Vblocks. In terms of percentage, HPE's still about 60% of our landscape.

We moved to an x86 infrastructure and we could probably move other workloads from IBM-related infrastructure across to an HPE infrastructure. We could standardize further, but from an x86 perspective, it becomes more or less agnostic regarding which vendor infrastructure is the underlying infrastructure; as long as the operating system and virtualization can take place on top.

It did take us quite some time to make the business case and to get the funding, but once we got all of that, the project went smoothly. We never had any issues.

For the technical part of the setup, we brought in professional services from HPE and they did the initial configuration and the racking and stacking of the systems.

We were looking at VCE Vblock, HPE, Oracle and IBM. We went with HPE because the HPE platform is about 60%, IBM is about 10%, and Oracle is about 30%.

We're based in South Africa and we're pretty much dependent on the OEM to help us and advise us. HPE is able to advise us, especially on the architectural designs they can actually vet the architectural designs and give input that has proven to be valuable to us.

We always try to check supportability of the platform post-project implementation. Trust me, before the project implementation, before they kick up, all the vendors will lobby. Obviously, when you’ve gone live and you start having problems after the fact, the vendors stay far away. So you need to make sure that in-country support is there and the skills are there. For example, we had an experience with Oracle where they didn't even have the skill sets at the right support levels.

For us, the best feature of the BladeSystems is the plug-and-play capability. We are able to replace one quickly; everything's hot-pluggable. The enclosures are well made. The way we manage our enclosures, everything's done through one iLO. It's really easy to keep on top of things. They are what they are. They do the job they're designed to do.

When we initially went with blade servers, our footprint in the datacentre went down. We still have to use large ProLiant servers. We mainly use it in a Citrix environment, so we use each blade as a Xen host. Although we might have about 400 blades, we've then got four VMs running off that, whereas in the past, we would have had thousands of servers all stacked up on top of each other.

We have a niggle with the iLO connection. Sometimes you can go from one PC to another and how the iLO reacts depends on the web browser setup. I'd like to see something like HTML5 setup for iLO, so you don't need to install any Java or any of the plug-ins; so it's completely universal.

It’s a great system, but it’s not perfect yet.

We've had blade servers for about 10 years.

We don't have any real issues with stability.

We have a HPE support contract. If anything does go wrong, it's just, swap it out, put it back in. I'll be careful what I mention, but sometimes the technical support online isn't great. You're often dealing with people who just ask you basic questions and ask you to check things that you've already checked. You know the fault's there; you wouldn't be logging the call if the fault wasn't there. But the engineers that come on-site are great.

Initially, we were using Compaq equipment. Then Compaq and HP merged. We did do trials with IBM, but we found it to be a bit of a step back in that the kit just wasn't quite as high tech. It just seemed at the time it was a massive step back in the way we were working. HP seemed like it was a step ahead.

My advice is to invest early dollars on higher capacity. In the early stages, we didn't put enough high power kit in and we ended up upgrading all the time, especially on the memory side. I think we went in quite low with RAM and we went through a massive process of upgrading all that.

The most valuable features are scalability, flexibility and deployment, as well as the ease of networking solutions within the chassis.

The low cost of deployment is the greatest benefit to our company. It saves us money.

The only thing we think is on the down side is that you can't push them anywhere near as hard as the pizza-box servers; the rack mounts. We knew this at the very start, but it is something that makes us not totally go down that route. We do have a parallel deployment using those for our more aggressive situations.

The BladeSystem is very stable. Being an architect, I think the down times have been all within the expected goal, so we have not had any issues with that.

It's able to scale very well. That's one of the benefits of it.

I do remember that we had some technical questions on Virtual Connect and technical support was a bit slow in the early days, but that has improved.

There was a company-wide decision, but we chose BladeSystem on the grounds that we had to do a rapid deployment. We didn't have an awful lot of time to get in to the detail, so we wanted something that knew was going to work. It's something we trusted would work. The scalability offered the fact that we could easily add to our installations in the various data centres that we have fairly quickly and horizontally scale out our applications.

The initial setup was fine. It was more that we needed to know some of the technical error ins and outs regarding that, because we were using multicast mechanisms across the WAN and wanted to know how good the traffic flows worked; the ingress on the chassis and to the BladeSystems.

We went with HPE because of the performance. We set it against Dell, and evaluated its performance, because we also buy their hardware products. But, to be honest, we found Dell's far slower. We just said, there's no way we're going to go for that.

In general, when selecting a vendor to work with, cost and performance are the most important criteria.

Regarding the connectivity setups, we've done it all now. We could smooth that path. Now it's very simple for us. If there are any difficulties, it's probably of our own making.