HPE Hyper Converged Reviews

The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities.

The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced.

I have been using HPE Hyper Converged for two or three years.

HPE Hyper Converged is a very stable solution.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine or ten out of ten.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution's deployment takes more than three days with the testing and everything in place.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

We have three nodes with software-defined storage virtualization based on KVM. We also use oVirt as an open-source solution. HPE Hyper Converged has simplified our data center operations.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors.

Another key feature would be that the upgrade process is much easier, especially when adding the third and fourth nodes. The availability, user interface, and configuration are also straightforward.

The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency.

I have been working with this solution since HPE started selling Hyper Converged products around 2014. So, it has been nine years now.

Stability is very good. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

It is a highly scalable solution. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

The support is very good. Every time we do an installation, HPE directly handles the support. However, we have to pay separately for the support.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. Not much of a complex process. 

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one being difficult and ten being easy. It's quite straightforward.

Considering the features it offers, I'd say it's not very cost-effective, but it provides real value for the money.

I would recommend it because of the global support they provide, the ease of installation, and the availability of after-sales support. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. More customization and improved backup efficiency compared to traditional systems. These features would make it a ten and are what I recommend to others using HPE.

We had four ESX hosts and a big storage rack. We needed to replace it really quickly. It's all VMware stuff and it involved moving it over. The unit came in. Our lead architect spent an hour with it, figured out a couple IP addresses that it needed to have, and it was up and running in four hours. He was able to migrate all the workloads off the old equipment in three days. From the time it came into the building, it took three days. Everything was moved over.

He was moving things slowly at first, moving non-critical things during the day. Then once we saw it was non-impact, he just moved the rest of it. That old equipment was ready to go just like that. This is a C250, which doesn't have the back up and all the extra features that SimpliVity has, but if they're delivering that kind of functionality in the same way that they delivered the C250, then that'd be great.

The most valuable feature was its time to delivery.

I'm guessing that the next release will be the SimpliVity stack. I don't know. It seems like they've got a lot of features packed in there. There's nothing that comes to mind in terms of improvement. It has worked pretty well. We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem.

Stability is really good. I guess there's not much else to say. We've been running it for a year and a half. We bought it near the beginning of its offering to meet a specific challenge. We were a little bit nervous at first. We looked at Nutanix. We looked at some other hyper-converged units. We saw the HPE offering as a value proposition for us. It's worked out pretty well. We have decided to set that as a standard for our remote and branch offices. In fact, we just ordered another one for our San Francisco office to replace their equipment.

Scalability is a question that we have. We only have four node units and we were wondering if it makes sense. Where's the inflection point here? Will we actually implement that in our data center? Do we want a standard composable system, or would we do a bunch of nodes? At this point, we have a bunch of SimpliVity nodes versus blades plus Nimble Storage.

That's a decision that we're going to be looking at in the next two years. I'm very interested to see testimonies of how it scales. I just came from the Red Bull presentation, and it looks like they had a similar amount of VMs and storage, and they moved everything to six nodes of SimpliVity. That's very encouraging.

We haven’t needed to use technical support.

We decided on HPE because it was at the right price point. There's a certain brand confidence that we had with it. All of our other equipment worked with HPE. We had a good a good partner and it was at the right price point.

We knew it was time to look for a new product because we were doing a renovation in our DC office, which is our main office. We were moving a large amount of equipment to a new co-location in Ashburn, which is outside of Washington, DC. We still needed to maintain a significant amount of compute and storage on premises. As part of the renovation, we were losing our 400-square-foot computer room, and it was going down to maybe 150 square feet. We had to significantly reduce our rack space. In essence, we had to reduce two and a half racks down to two. That was one of the drivers. We wanted to reduce the amount of power, the number of UPS units, and the cooling. This solution hit all of those targets.

When I first went to get the product, it was a little bit of sticking my neck out, taking a little bit of a risk. For someone who's very risk-averse, that was my first step out. Looking back after a year and a half, I really think that it was the right decision.

It has made my job easier. As we're thinking about San Francisco, we had a month to try to figure out, "How are we going to move all this equipment?" We decided, let's get a new hyper-converged unit and move everything over. Then we'll leave the old equipment. We don't need to pay for the transportation costs of that old equipment. We can decommission it and send it back early, because it was on lease.

I was not directly involved in the initial setup, but I was watching it. He finished it an hour or two. From what he said, it was pretty straightforward.

We looked at Nutanix. We looked at some other hyper-converged units.

Make sure that you order the right connectors to connect to your existing storage to move everything. Make sure that you have that inter-connect to move all your data off of your old legacy equipment.

I just know that it works. If you find a good partner that gives you a PoC unit, I'm sure that they'll find that it's quick to get up and running.

With the primary data center of clients where we do virtualization, Hyper Convergence basically gives them a little advantage over the traditional virtualization. The solution is used on-premise.

There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high. It's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking about the SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution. With the competition, if two hard drives fail, they're out of the picture. Whereas with HPE Hyper Converged, in each node, even if three hard drives go down, they're better. There's continuity.

In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM. I'm specifically talking about certain propositions in the dHCI that only support VMware as the Hypervisor. They could have all different layers of Hypervisors, like the KVM or X, Y, Z.

Currently dHci Nimble offers only VMware as native hypervisor and will be great if it can support others  like Red Hat, KVM etc too. Although this is not a limitation as one can install Red Hat & other operating systems as a Virtual machine on top of VMware hypervisor. 

I have been using HPE Hyper Converged for more than five years now.

The solution is very stable. I haven't seen any failures with the deployments we have in the Hyper Convergence environment.

If I talk about HPE Enterprise SimpliVity, the scalability is there because you can add on nodes. If you're talking about the Converged level, there could be a lot of improvements because if I do an upgrade on one node, I need to do that similarly on the second node, which increases costs.

The support layer from HPE is pretty good. If you are purchasing that from HPE Enterprise at the time of purchasing the equipment, the support is pretty smooth.

Positive

Initial setup is pretty easy. It's not that complicated.

If I'm comparing the solution with Dell, HPE Hyper Converged is definitely cheaper in my experience.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

dSCI is Disaggregated Hyper Convergence. For the existing investment that a customer has done on a HPE platform, for example, they don't need to throw away that investment because they can re-utilize them in the dHCI configuration. Secondly, it's more scalable at the component level. That means I can upgrade when required for storage or computing needs separately. I don't need to do the same, like what they used to do in SimpliVity.

Until recently, I was selling HPE SimpliVity. After dHCI has come in the picture with Nimble, we started promoting that because they have better features. When it comes to Hyper Convergence only, the features in SimpliVity and dHCI are different.

If you were comparing this solution to VMware, it has more features, and it's very fast on the recovery.

One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host. While in the normal VM, we just used the existing viable machine and moved it to another host without an issue.

As this product is new to me, I need to do a bit more training to see what it offers.

It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful.

The stability is so nice. We like it.

The scalability is good. Right now we are deploying our production environment and our plan is to do the same in the DR environment also. We plan on increasing usage in the future.

Technical support has been fine so far. We have only been using the solution for the last two or three months, so it's hard to answer this question because we are new.

As far as I know, we did not do the installation, it was done with another company.

We were working with a vendor for HPE and they did all of the installations for us. 

The solution is easy to use and the data application and data recovery so far are better and faster than the competition. Many other features are really great.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. We like Hyper Converged HPE, but there's definitely a lot of unfamiliar features that I cannot comment much about until I've experienced them. 

It's easier to maintain. We think it offers performance benefits and easier use.

We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform. It meets our needs now, but if there's growth later, it's easy to add on another node or two.

You don't have to go out and get more servers and get additional pieces of the SAN. It's one box that has its own warranty, so it's not mixing. With the SAN, you'd get additional drives, but they'd have a warranty that started and ended separate from the original SAN. It got complicated. This makes all of that process easier.

From the release that we have, we'd like to see better integration with vCenter and OneView. I believe the vCenter integration is available in an update that was released earlier this year. We have not applied it yet. It is complex to set up and it is not something you would really want to have to do yourself.

The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites. I heard that the version 2 of the software handles that better.

We are working with HPE to get the software updated to the new version.

Our implementation involved two separate clusters at two different locations. We wanted to be able to manage the two clusters from a peered vcenter instance so we could have 2 independent clusters but one management point. The version of software and OneView that were available at the time of installation did not support peered vCenters.

So better integration will all of the features supported by vCenter. There might be another option it was not discussed at the time of the install if there was or is.

We haven't had any issues with the stability. We're still in a pre-production phase and there was a drive fail in the first couple months. That's not uncommon for the initial stages. We haven't any other issues.

We haven't scaled it, but that's one of the reasons why we chose it, because of the fact that it is scalable.

We used technical support for the drive. They were very good.

We've been looking for something that was easily scalable and would meet our needs for our VMware platform. When we came across this solution, it fit those needs. When selecting a vendor, we look for reputation.

The setup was a little bit complex. There were a lot of things to do with the USB drive to reload the images and then build it up. If it didn't build in a particular order, then that node has to be reloaded and you start all over again. They were also fairly new at the time, so hopefully it's gotten easier since then.

We also looked at Simplivity and Nutanix. Simplivity was really our vendor of choice, but the price point was a little high and they didn't have the longevity that we were looking for in a vendor. If we were to do this again today, we probably choose Simplivity, because they were acquired by HPE.

They should talk with their HPE rep and see about either getting a demo or having a technical conversation about that. It's worth the time.

Scaling and ease of management are good features. 

In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing.

I have been working with HPE for the past ten years. 

In my experience, some business cases existed in the past. From my own country's perspective, currently, we haven't seen new customers adopting HPE HyperConverged, although existing users are still on board.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten because sometimes it lags or crashes. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. It is a scalable solution. 

Customer service and support are working in the right way. 

The initial setup is easy. Features for maintenance patching, and updating are available. 

We only use it for on-premises virtualization infrastructure, not the cloud.

Most likely, it's a perpetual license.  

Our customers do not prefer subscription-based solutions, so we typically offer subscription-based support, but the license itself is perpetual.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. I would recommend using this solution. We are an HPE partner, so staying up-to-date with Spectrum and gaining relevant knowledge is crucial for our company's success. That's the main value for us.

The most valuable feature is the in-built backup system. The backup speed is also excellent.

The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases.

The solution should have more in-depth manuals or user information. This would not only help us but also assist our customers.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any complaints. It's a very effective solution.

Scaling the solution is simple. You simply need to add the resources, such as CPU or memory storage. It works like a cluster. If you have two nodes, then a third node can be added to the existing cluster.

We have not reached out to technical support as of yet, but so far, we haven't needed it.

Previously, we had what we called a traditional system, where you have a separate server, and storage, and a new backup system. All of this occupied almost three to four servers. This solution now covers all of our requirements in one. Our previous infrastructure was also almost all physical infrastructure. There was no virtualization. Now, we're almost 100% virtual in our infrastructure.

The initial setup is very simple. Any system engineer who has experience in VMware will find it very user-friendly. Deployment took about a week. Apart from the hardware, we had to install two types of hypervisors, and then we handled the virtual machines and the backup. For deployment, we had five engineers.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

For us, there are no extra costs above the standard licensing fees.

We are using the on-premises deployment model.

If you're looking for virtualization solutions, this is a very good product. If you're an organization that does not need virtualization or has some applications that cannot use it, you should look into other solutions, such as HP Synergy. That's an enterprise-level product, however. It's not suitable for SMBs.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.