HPE OneView Reviews

The most valuable features of the product are health control, keeping an eye on the status of the server and the repository management for firmware.

I can download the SPP from HP and upload it to OneView. After that, I can add servers to that SPP and choose to deploy it to the servers. OneView 3.0 gives us the control of the health on our servers, it reports it directly to HPE with fault, and also gives me a fast message when something happens. In 3.0, the errors messages are better explained.

Insight Remote Support that came with 3.0 automatic reports faults to HPE, and I get reference a number back from them. In an hour or less, I get called or contacted by HPE. This information is also added to the support portal, there I also have all my servers added.Then, I can write a message on the case from the Portal, and also read what HPE is doing.

Firmware - In 3.0, HPE has done a better job with firmware updates, added more features, and also enabled the possibility to stage updates on the iLO card. Now you can create a template and add a server instead of one profile for each server. This helps when changing settings to an FKS VMware template or Hyper-V template. When I upload I spp to OneView, I can now have more than two spp uploaded, this gives me the possibility to downgrade to older spp if I have issues, and also have control of what spp and firmware are installed on servers.

It provides a better control of what is installed on each server. Now, we have control over the hardware status and what is happening on the hardware in regards to hardware failures and other alarms

In the new version, we're going to get warranty status and automatic failure reports to HPE. These benefits we are going to use for sure.

I would like to choose what I want monitored from the server. I want to disable features like performance monitoring, utilization, and power control. They could add more customization of the SPPs in the system, so I can upload the SPP but then select what I want or don't want in the SPP after I've uploaded it into the system.

Another area of improvement could be in the report functionality by providing more customization so that I can create customized reports since I like to use the ones besides what HPE wants me to show.

We have had different stability issues. We have experienced a lot of downtime on it. We have used this product from the first version up until what is available right now and have noticed that a lot of the functions have stopped working suddenly with no reason. This was now in version 2.0.7. Then we maxed out the amount of alarms and after that the system crashed. However, HPE has cleaned this out.

For the last four weeks or so, we have had no issues. We still have version 2.7 but we are planning to upgrade to version 3.0.

In the earlier versions, scalability was not that good but it has improved in the newer versions. The appliance is designed more for bigger environments and the whole GUI is faster than the old ones.

The technical support is okay. It's better when I come to the second level; the first level isn't so good. They should know more about how OneView works and not just read out the standard stuff and rules from a paper because no customer is the same. In addition, when I call them, I have downloaded my part of the analysis and I just need help to find out how to fix the error.

We have used HPE before, i.e., the old system. We have had HPE from G4-G9

We have stated to use HPE Blade systems C7000.

I was involved in the setup process. When we started the process, it was easy to install. It worked right after we opened some firewall ports; everything worked okay. It was okay in regards to service and management; nothing difficult about that.

I implemented oneview my self, but had some help from HPE.

You should start small in size . Initially, start with 5-10 servers and have that running for a couple of months to see how it works. After which you can deploy it on everything else. In other words, start small, work it out and then get bigger.

Oneview

From my previous experience with stability, the system needs to prove that it is stable now and that the functions are working better than the earlier versions.

From a single pane of glass, one product is used to:

• Manage all of our systems
• Do boots from SANs
• Build profiles
• Add the firmware and drivers

It makes things quicker because you only have to go into one application instead of into multiple applications. It makes it easier for new users that are in our group to learn it.

I would like to see them improve the firmware and BIOS settings. I would like to make those a little easier to use and make it fit across more of our environments. Besides that, I don't really think it's missing anything.

I think it is very stable. We are running version 2 or 3. Version 3 has been really good. We haven't had any issues with it. We had some issues with version 2, but that's just because it was new.

It is very scalable. We run 1400 environments and we haven't had any issues with the 500 physical environments.

Technical support is pretty good. We haven't had any issues with them and they get back to us. They don't do the common things, such as asking us to upgrade the firmware. They just actually help you out with the question or problem that you're having.

We used the older versions of HPE IC and SIM. Those required two interfaces and you also had to go through your OA. There were a lot of different steps to it. Teaching somebody new was always a little more difficult. Now you teach them with HP OneView, and they can automatically click on the server or the profile and go right down to the actual physical blades, and see what chassis it is in and where it is located.

When selecting a vendor, we like that we use HPE for everything except for storage. We've used them from large systems, to blades, to racks, and to clusters. We've used them for a lot of things. I think just the fact that they have such a broad portfolio of products was part of our decision.

With 3.1 coming out, it will have all of the features I was looking for. When that comes out in July, then I think we will have everything that we're looking for. I think they are ahead of the curve on what works.

It is a pretty good product. I like the fact that it's a single pane of glass. I don't like having the old environment, which had HP IC and SIM and all those other components. It always took a long time to get to the OA. Now you have one view of everything: your applications and your servers. You an easily pull reports, so there is definitely an advantage in using it.

I was not involved in the initial set up. The upgrade was very straightforward. I was involved in that part. It takes a little while but, no it was no big deal.

A long time ago, we put HPE in the blade environment against other vendors: Dell, Cisco, and IBM. Cisco had just brought out their new blade at the time. By far, HPE was easier to use and simple as far as adding memory. We can boot from SAN. It seemed like a very good product all around for doing everything that we wanted it to do.

I would think that any company would want to use it. It makes it easier for the user, the administrator, and makes it simpler from a reporting standpoint. You can see your entire environment.

I have 200-plus services in around 40 different locations, therefore I need to be assured that I know when things break down, a disk goes bad, etc. So, I can see it, use the global dashboard, and give that view to our operations guys so they can see if something goes wrong. The work is 24/7, however I do not work those hour, so my team can see it and that is basically what I am using it for. I used to use other products, an old HPE SIEM that was not so good. This one is definitely better.

It gives us a view of all our servers, which we did not have before in real-time. It is definitely an improvement for the guys that are sitting and watching the servers.

We can actually see if a server in China goes missing a disk or something. We can respond right away. It calls back. Or, if you have set it up, it actually calls HPE directly, if something is wrong and they respond to it. It is actually a quite good feature. It happens approximately within one minute.

I had some minor difficulties with upgrading, but the solution still works fine. That is basically it. I can see what I want. I am still looking for more improvements. I am not that into the deployment part. I am more into viewing on a global scale what goes well, and what goes bad. I do not apply using the tool, yet. I am not sure I am going to use it, because I have had a bad experience with some other products, so I am not sure I am going that way. However, with the monitoring and the management part, it is very good.

With upgrades, it simply stopped. It was the database. It was not digitized correctly, so they fixed it pretty fast. In this particular case, technical support was very responsive.

When I did the upgrade with help from HPE, and it went through, I saw that I was able to switch on remote support. So, I connected to see what our contract was like. Was it 24/7 or 9/5? So, I accidentally turned it on, and maybe I should not have, but it started enabling remote support on all our services. This is definitely something I would like to more heavily rely on, because we need to see if we forgot a server. We have about 200, and we could easily have forget one.

We cannot travel around to all our offices, so some got lost, it happens. Maybe we forgot to buy an extended contract or something. We have an external firm, as well, to help us with that. So, I would like to see that. I saw it was turned on, but I could not change things. I would like to extend that contract to a 24/7, and not 9/5, so you could click that button that said, "Are you sure?" Yes, I am sure. Okay, I am going to puff it up for you, and I am going to send you an extra bill. That is fine by me. I would like that.

No issues.

I have to chop it up into smaller parts, because I have an installation in Europe and it covers the whole world. That is not so good. So, I am going to make some Data Senders around the world. Because if I have to patch the server, it is not the greatest way to do it from Europe to China, or something like that. They need to be more localized, so I am going to chop it up into smaller bits.

Sometimes, we have had a few breakdowns when some other parts was so bad. They did not respond properly, and after some discussions they did. Now, everything moves quickly. I do not have to open tickets at the moment.

We had to stop using the previous solution, because it was the old HPE SIEM product. It continuously crashed for us. We used it to monitor our storage and our service, and it did not work. So, we stopped using any product at all for about a year, then we heard about this one. I was talking to our Account Manager and said, "I need this one, because then I can actually see what is going on."

Of course, it is been a long journey for OneView 1.0, but now it is actually working and we can see all our servers, even the small ones that we have. We have offices of 2500 people, and offices with five people. So, we have small servers, microservers, actually. There is a difference from big to small, and we are actually able to see all of them. Maybe we cannot manage the small ones, but we can monitor them and the big ones. A great feature.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward. I just read the manual.

No. We are strictly HPE products.

Do not expect wonders, but use it as it is, as a tool to monitor and manage if you want to. Especially monitor, because it can give you a headstart on any problems. It could warn you if the fan is running high-pitch, if the temperature is high, and so on. So, it is actually giving you a headstart. That is the advice.

Use it, but do not think it is going into the clouds, because it is not. There is room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are honest. I do not care if it has flaws and it does not work exactly as they say, as long as they say, "We are working on this, and it might not work exactly how we say it will, but it's where we are going forward." This is actually one of the things I value the most.

Profile templates: The ability to generate the profiles and lay them down so the servers are built consistently. I would say that's probably the biggest piece of it.

To be able to rapidly roll-out a lot of servers consistently and quickly, without having to go in and tweak each thing individually. After we get the template built, we can just apply it and push it down

It's a nice product. It's a little slow sometimes. Overall, I think it does what it's supposed to do. I think that as they evolve it, it'll get quicker.

Stability's been fairly good on OneView, the appliance. In terms of Synergy Composer, which is a OneView central derivative, it is a little slow being on that bare, metal hardware. It would be nice to have one product, OneView, that could manage both Synergy and legacy devices without having two separate products. I understand that's what the dashboard is all about, but it still would be nice to have less components.

We bought Synergy because we were doing a Greenfield and we knew that the writing was on the wall as far as what the future was going to be in terms of Synergy versus C-1000. The choice was to not invest in the older technology, but rather to invest in the newer technology to future-proof ourselves. 

That dictated that we needed a solution. As to why did we chose one or the other, that was basically future proofing. 

It is a little scary to be the "data customer". We're one of the first 50 customers right now to purchase it. Composer is one unit in Synergy, but it's a physical appliance. We also have to other appliances to manage all the old legacy stuff: C-7000, 580s, 380s, anything else you'd want. So we have both of those. It wasn't a choice of one or the other. You have to have this for this and you have to have that for that. 

That single band of class that is kind of the manager of the managers. It really saves a lot of time. One of the main reasons we didn't use OneView sooner with our older environment was one of the initial caveats. Once you brought a box, or you brought a C-7000 chassis into the OneView management purview, it basically took over and did a whole bunch of stuff. You have to plan it out because it took over and you would have to reconfigure things.

Instead of just taking it in, and leaving things in a view-only mode, so I still can see it. Maybe at least I could view it in a single pane glass so I could see where things are at. That was kind of why that supposedly had been fixed. You can now bring things in without outages, but I don't trust it. I will delay the evacuation of a chassis to the time when we bring that in.

The counterpart who I work with did the majority of the actual hands-on setup. He worked with HPE to get them committed. 

On the Synergy side, for Composer, (OneView composer), he also did the deployment for the virtual appliance that we rolled out, our C-7000. For some of the view, we only brought some of our rack mount servers into view-only mode. I use it, but I didn't implement it.

I think the implementation was pretty straightforward from what I could gather. It didn't look too complicated, at least on the appliance side. I've been told that you can create profiles for hardware that you don't have. 

My biggest gripe is that a profile is tethered to a particular hardware type. I would like to be able to take a profile, of more generic nature, and apply it to different types of blades without having to build another profile for that blade type. I would like some inter-operability there, without having to have multiple templates. Other than that, it's been fairly stable. 

I think there are some configuration things you can do in Virtual Connect that can harm you from an availability standpoint. OneView still allows you to do that, which I don't think it should. Those are just my thoughts, as far as a criss-cross between virtual connects, where you can actually create an outage for yourself for updates. But other than that, it has met our needs. I think the biggest things for me are the profiles that I can flip between different hardware types.

As the guy that does the work and not the guy that handles the money, I am interested in whatever makes my job easier. Simple is always better. If it's a simple, straightforward solution, that is always the best solution for me as an engineer. 

For the people that handle the purse strings, I guess money is a greater concern. As far as the technology goes, anything that makes my life easier and I don't get calls in the middle of the night, that's what matters to me. That should matter to the business as well. Obviously, if I'm not getting calls, then things are up. If it's simple, it's better for everybody, in terms of the roll-out times, troubleshooting, and fewer pieces to break.

I would say the only competitor is probably Cisco solution. Their competitive or comparable product, in the OneView space, is kind of the manager of managers, is UCS Central. It has been out for some time. I feel, in some ways, OneView's doing a little catch-up to them. That's just my opinion, as I've used that in the past. 

My company is a very HPE heavy company. They have been way before I came to work here. I think in many respects, you kind of go with what you know and what you are comfortable with. That's what they've always been used to, so they have a good relationship and they've continued on that path.

I think it's good to know that if they already use HPE products, it may not be time to start analyzing whether or not to use competitive products. I think competitively, there are probably some advantages to one of the other possibilities. However, I don't think it is necessarily a good idea to throw out what you have now in order to switch.

We chose OneView when we decided to do a technology refresh on our data center. At that point we were buying over 40 HPE enclosures and 500 blades and we really wanted some kind of automation technology to help us manage and deploy that infrastructure at speed. We're a kind of company that does things fairly quickly with short notice.

We expected that we would need to deploy the new equipment fairly quickly andthere was a lot of pressure to get stuff done as soon as the decision was made to purchase. OneView allowed us to accelerate the base configuration far faster and more accurately than ever before with manual configuration procedures.

When we came a year later to extending the infrastructure having OneView allowed us to quickly extend with the same configuration deployed in hours rather than days.

OneView has allowed us to standardize a lot. Prior to that, everything was done on a individual basis. So we now have standard templates for our servers and partially automated deployments. The configuration quality of new infrastructure has been a problem in the past.

Also, we benefit from improved monitoring,compliance and updates. That whole tool set has come together into OneView. We're a small team of six managing a large environment and it's probably saved around a person's time every two weeks; a day a week or half-day a week of their time just in trolling through things looking for logs and such.

At a recent conference, I spoke to the guys in the CDA booth about what's coming and there's quite a few features in there already that I was looking for. I've asked for some better facilities around the management of alerts. The system currently has 75,000 alerts that are either being acknowledged or some are active, and there's not a simple way of selecting a whole filtered list and then closing them off and deleting them. So one of my bits of feedback already to the development guys is around alert management.

Also, I've spoken to them about some more role-based access control for the new Oneview global dashboard tool that was recently launched. We could do it in OneView itself, that's capable of doing role-based control to some extent, but it’s quite minimum in the dashboard tool. It only provides basic functions like administrate, modify, and read only. We'd like to see that broadened and then I'd like to see that pushed up into the OneView dashboard, but I believe in recent versions of Oneview this is also being improved with resource scopes .

Since 2014.

No.

The product is really pretty stable now, pretty good. We've had minor issues, so if I were going to rate it either a 4/5 or 5/5, I'd go for a 4/5. We've had some bugs in terms of things not quite working when we've done upgrades. But we've had good support from HPE.

Scalability wise, it meets our companies needs. We were very close to the initial limits of the product when it first came out. Those limits have been raised now, but we've not grown into that arena, so we're okay.

We have used technical support extensively. We have escalated some issues back to developers and had been supported that way as well when the issues have gone beyond the basic kind of issues. I would rate support itself 4/5. Cool handling and just getting to the level of where you need to be, probably a 3/5. I think that's really because we tend to do a lot of triage ourselves. We've got guys that are not ones to pick up the phone straight away to call technical support. So we need to push them into that and to use technical support more. Technical supports always gets us there, but it takes time.

I was using all the standard HPE tools that come as standard with the infrastructure itself, such as the built in Onboard Administrator, Virtual Connect Manager and Service pack for Proliant. The scale of the refresh we were doing and the time frame we were trying to do it in led us to OneView. It allowed us to merge all these seperate point management solutions into the one tool for managing and updating the hardware/firmware.

Initial setup was very straightforward. OneView is a very straightforward piece of software to use. I would rate 'ease of use' very highly.

In house.

I would advise others to be sure about what you want to get out of the tool and that you understand its limitations. Definitely go through a demonstration yourself. It's very hard to bring a crosswalk, what's its capable of in just documentation and the like.

Our company served as a testing facility for the solution where thousands of technicians working on different projects, products, and partnerships.

We used the solution to manage platforms, standalone servers, and enclosure frames. We did not directly install the solution, but rather developed plugins for integration with the VMware virtualization platform. 

For one use case, we integrated the solution with the Synergy frame to manage platforms contained in single or clustered enclosures. 

For another use case, we deployed the solution as an appliance for a virtualization platform, added the enclosures or servers, and called them up via iLO or other management software. 

The hypervisor and cluster profiles make it easy to integrate with VMware. 

The solution could add storage, integration services, and end-to-end support for Cisco switches or other competitor products. 

There is no partner product to manage standalone Dell services so manual connections or Aruba are required. 

I have used the solution for quite a few years. 

The solution is quite stable. I have used the solution for many years so do not have stability comparisons with competitor products. 

There is some dependency because patches and updates are frequently released. It is important to keep things up-to-date for best stability. This is not considered a drawback but rather a standard procedure for most solutions. 

The solution is scalable and I used simulation mode for many enclosures and 400-500 nodes with no inefficiencies. 

The simulation included management of internal scripts and nodes with no physical servers or environment. The solution managed these resources without needing physical nodes to be present. 

Our team did not need technical support because we were able to solve issues on our own. 

Our company was contracted to work solely with the solution and develop multiple servers. We even worked at HPE's headquarters in Texas. We tested any new products, servers, configurations, or architecture with VMware before releasing it into the market. 

The setup is easy and offers two installation options. 

Synergy can be installed via a USB drive that opens automatically.

The solution can also be installed as a standalone that opens a virtual machine within fifteen minutes for completion of IPE-4 or IPE-6 setups. 

User guides are available that include setup overviews and instructions. 

Our company completed implementations in-house. Junior technicians who review user guides can easily understand the concepts of configuration and installation. 

The solution offers two pricing models. 

Synergy does not require iLO licenses but requires the purchase of servers or enclosures that come with the default OneView. 

The older platform requires iLO licenses but does not require the purchase of servers. This platform has problems because it is dependent on old class enclosures and hardware that cannot link or be managed with the solution. 

We were contracted with the solution so did not evaluate other products. 

Before using the solution, read the user and configuration guides which include important information about troubleshooting, recoveries, backups and restores, features, and available support. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for its Synergy platform. 

• Single pane of glass
• Like a dashboard out-of-the-box
• Minimal setup
• Very easy to get going with

Places all of your different HPE products in one place, all in the circles where you can just get everything into nice, easy-to-use silos pretty easily. There's very little user training involved. I mean, out-of-the-box, it's pretty intuitive.

• More on the software development side
• Forms of HPE's REST API
• Different web services available for the product, especially connecting OneView back to HPE Passport and HPE Ticketing Solutions.

There is a lot of automated stuff in there, but we'd like to step into the middle of that and bring in our own different tools as a part of that integration. That would be nice.

We would really love to see greater integration, something I've raised with the HPE software engineers. They have been very forthcoming and very honest about what they'd like to do with the product.

Since they went to Version 3, it's been excellent. We had a couple of beta versions before that, which kind of just sitting around the office. Nobody was really using them. But then when Version 3 came out, it was so stable that it just started to take off.

We went from having maybe a couple of chassis in there, to having 50 or 60 C-Class chassis in there. As we add more equipment, the speed and the latency of the product seem to stay pretty low, which is awesome.

We have used HPE tech support. We had an HPE systems engineer come to the data center and help us install it. We had a demo on the Synergy frames that is imperative to setting up OneView. He came and set it all up for us. It was excellent, like hands-on, no question that couldn't be asked and no question that couldn't be answered. It is really good.

SIM does not really fit anymore. It was awesome for Gen 6 and previous, but when you go to Gen 7, 8, 9, and now Gen 10, there's so much new technology in there that you need a more complex silo or a more complex tool, like OneView. We are a full, 100% HPE shop, so it's just natural that we'd pick an excellent HPE software product to go with our excellent HPE hardware products.

When selecting a vendor, I look for good communication, excellent products, and friendly staff.

Get in there early and look at integrating, because Gen 7 and below is not going to be supported anymore. Anything new you buy can be used with OneView now, within a one life-cycle of your data center, or with one five-year life-cycle. Everything will be supported in there.

Well, it's in my lab right now. It's great because it tracks warranty and support status but it also gives me the ability to go in and configure server profiles. It's primarily in a blade enclosure. I can manage server profiles and I can manage networks, all from one place.

Well, it gives me the ability to also do firmware updates and schedule those and track those firmware updates so I can see if it complies with a profile for firmware and drivers and all that.

Well I was at the booth and I guess they're going to announce it here in a few minutes, the version 3.1 and all the stuff that they've added in 3.1. It just keeps getting better, more support for more hardware, more functionality.

Well, the newer hardware, that's the biggest thing. You've got some of the newer StoreVirtual devices and more functionality in the storage networking and iSCSI stuff, and support for some of those arrays.

It was kind of rough around the edges in version 1 but much stabler in 1.2. Version 2 and version 3 are much, much, much better.

Well, you can scale it but they've got tools. It can only go to so many enclosures. I think it's 40 enclosures. 20 or 40, I can't remember exactly. But they built a manager of managers to do more capacity and more installations.

Well when you're a partner you don't get HP Tech Support on your demo licenses so I had to build it myself but I managed to get through it and it's not inherently hard but you've got to pay attention to the details.

I was using the previous solution, Insight Control and HPSim, so this is much better.

There wasn't really and option for alternative solutions as we're an HP partner.

When considering vendors it is important that they have support for their products. If you buy one solution, you want to be able to manage that and maybe other solutions so they're starting to pull in the rack mount servers for OneView as well, so that will become a nice ecosystem. You can deal with storage networking and other various servers with the same interface.

You have got to look at the economics because it's not free.

You can use OneView to monitor, so if all you need is something to go in and give an alert that something's broken, that's fine, that's free. But if you want the management capabilities and the drill down and more configuration doing things, then you're going to have to buy the licenses.