HPE OneView Reviews

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.

We're using OneView, which actually lets me control both 3PAR and our BladeSystems from one platform instead of having to jump back and forth between different management.

It improves everything we had, because everything we had was so old that dinosaurs would have been ashamed of using it. We were actually using an eleven year old IBM blade sever.

There are some portions of OneView that don't work with 3PAR, well actually it's parts of 3PAR that don't work with OneView. They're working on them now, so I already know it's in the road map. I can't say it's something that needs to be improved when they're already working on them.

It's extremely stable. The 3PAR has been rock solid since we put it in. The blades have been a godsend, they're like five hundred times better than the ones that they were using before we transferred over.

Scalability is perfect. If I need to, I can add another couple blades or I can add more to it. I still have about half my 3PAR nodes are open, so I can keep adding storage as I need it.

The only time we've used tech support was when we were setting it up, and there was an issue with the config file for the 3PAR. It was resolved within twenty minutes of actually getting a phone call through.

Service for HP has always been extremely good, and I've never had too many problems where I actually had to call service. It's usually just little things, like I had a keyboard key fall off, and one of my people actually called for that. That was about the worst thing that's happened with HP with me in about the last ten years.

I've been using HP ever since I can remember. They were actually some of the first computers that we had in the military when they started going over to computers, and I've been using them ever since. I wasn't, but one of our developers pushed forward Dell and they kind of blew up. Their quotes were outrageous compared to what it was from HP.

It was extremely straightforward and easy. Wasn't all that much because we were using the OneView, all I had to do was set up one blade, and then all the rest of the blades match, so I can just copy that profile off onto the others.

We were also looking at EMC but for what they want money, finance, and everything else for it, is probably about 45% more than what I paid for the same system through 3PAR, and the 3PAR can do more than EMC solution could do. It's not hard for me to use file persona. It was just get the licenses, set it up, and run.

Actually do the research, and not just try and run off of somebody at a blog, writing something. There's a lot more if you actually go into the research on the different products, what is actually really worth it and what isn't. A lot of stuff from EMC is expensive. It's more expensive than it needs to be going through HP.

We can configure the HPE server with OneView. We can add VLAN and update it.

The product does not work well. The logs are not proper.

I have been using the solution for two years.

We did not face any problems with the tool’s stability. We upgraded the product twice in the last two years.

The tool is scalable. We have ten users. The product is used twice a week.

The initial setup was not difficult. The deployment took one day.

We did the deployment in-house.

We use Ansible for automation.

The product is good. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The automation that we get within OneView and the visibility across all of our different products are the most valuable features.

As they continue to add into the product, it makes the provisioning process that much easier and more seamless.

So for us, as we continue to scale on multiple locations, we wanted to have a one view into all of that infrastructure, i.e., not having to go into all the individual products for all the different types of storage, compute, etc. It's that flexibility across all the different infrastructure platforms that we wanted this solution.

If I remember correctly, our CTO was saying that he wants to see a little bit more of integration into the HPE StoreVirtual VSA product. I know that it's either supposed to be or was recently added, but it's coming soon or is already there. I'm just not one hundred percent sure where it's as of now and that is one piece.

We now have a new HPE 3PAR added as well. I'm pretty sure that we can do what we need to do with that, but there might have been something my CTO was saying that he wanted to see integrated. I don't know what that is from the top of my head but, I'm pretty sure it's on the roadmap to actually get that implemented soon anyway.

We've been using HPE OneView for a couple of years and for a couple of our nodes. Then, we were waiting for the most recent release to come out so that we could backfill all of our blade nodes, i.e., just to help with the overall operations. So, we have been using this solution for really about a couple of years, but predominantly, within the last six months.

It's definitely very stable. Also, being able to import in all of our existing blade nodes, VMs and the storage was a seamless process. We had no problems with that, i.e., from what I understand and I haven't heard anything that has trickled up to my desk, anyway.

I foresee it meeting my future needs. We've got around twenty blade chassis and there are from, anywhere about, 12 to 16 hosts in each one of those. We still have a few more sets of infrastructure and some of our other geographies that we haven't licensed yet, but we'll definitely look to add that on here soon.

Technical support is fantastic. The support that we get, and actually, we just recently got a bunch of credits with this new program that has come out, they always meet our needs. The local guys are very good. I haven't seen any concerns probably in the last decade. We've been a long-standing HPE partner and the support has been very well.

The setup is very straightforward. You can even do it just by following the step-by-step instructions, i.e., if you're more adventurous and want to get into that. We, actually, had an engagement and had someone to help us on a webinar, i.e., a little bit of taking over control and helping us get it taken care of. However, it was a very straightforward process. There was definitely nothing that was out of the norm.

Choosing a vendor really starts with R&D, i.e., an organization that puts a lot of their money back in investing into new products and trying to make sure that the research is funded and moving forward is pretty important to us. Of course, that speaks to their brand. Outside of that, certainly support and then, really at the end, after all of those features cost is going to be the next factor that we look at. As long as they're competitive in the market and I am not looking for the least cost option, but definitely, having that runway to know that the roadmap is going to continue where we want to go and it's not just going to get dropped off/acquired. These are the factors that sum up as to how we look at a vendor when we're going to buy something.

There's always room for an improvement, but, definitely, it meets all of our needs. We're very happy with our OneView purchase and how it provides all that visibility into our entire infrastructure.

The automation is the big winner for people who use OneView. It allows several tasks to be rolled up into one very simple task.

It obviously saves me resource time, resource units. Not as many people are needed to do mundane tasks. That's where the automation comes in.

From our perspective, we don’t know of any needed improvements. Everything that was advertised to us has been available, was available and does work.

We find it quite stable. Most HPE solutions are stable.

Scalability is probably the biggest influence for choosing OneView. It doesn't matter if you're trying to manage 10 servers or 10,000 servers.

We have an account manager who is very good in this regard and any sort of technical support that we do need, we have engineers that are assigned to our account. They are always very, very helpful. Very efficient.

We didn’t have any previous solutions. It was just a correct step for us to take at the time. It was the next viable solution that we wanted in that space.

People on my team were involved in it and it was probably as smooth as we anticipated.

We spoke to several different vendors, including Dell and Hitachi. It came down to the whole idea of the partnership that we'd built up with HPE over the last 15 or 20 years.

I think you need to talk to as many vendors in the marketplace as you can. Listen to what they say and make an informed decision.

When looking for a vendor, we’re probably the same as everybody else. Cost is very important. I think the local relationship that we have with our HPE account manager and engineers within the island of Ireland makes a big difference.

What we were looking at originally with OneView was the server profiles. We were looking for:

• Something that could provision the server end-to-end with everything configured
• Core management
• Central management
• A way to manage everything
• Have a single plane of glass across all of the server platforms

Those were biggest things that were compelling and drew us to implement OneView.

Central management: That's something we're brand new to at CIBC, i.e., the bank. We never really had a centralized view. We had a very fragmented firmware process across the board with a lot of our hardware. During our refresh cycle, or when trying to keep everything current, that was when we had a real struggle. That's where OneView came into play.

We're still pretty junior into it, so right now our focus with regards to hardware is kind of being displaced now with the cloud. For future releases, it's probably not going to fall into our lap anymore. I probably can't really speak to what we would like to see in future releases, at least not at this point. As much as we've used OneView right now, it's probably not something that we're going to move forward with as a bigger footprint. We're trying to displace ourselves from the hardware platform.

Stability's good. It's an appliance, so really you plug it in and it's configured as it is. There is an advantage to the appliances, as we just put it in. We used a VM appliance and that was a pretty easy implementation. We just had to give it a compute and everything else was done for us.

Scalability is good. Right now, we're still at a small footprint. We are expanding over to another side of the bank that is also using OneView, so we're sharing the licenses. But we found that there were options. We sort of designed it so that we could scale out. We are making a central point server with a bunch of OneView nodes, so that we can still talk about everything at one central source, instead of being continually fragmented.

I did not use technical support. Right now, we are still engaged with professional services, so we had the support right on-site.

We knew we needed to invest just because of the fragmentation issue. We noticed that every time there was an incident or occurrence, it was firmware related. Generally, when you open an incident ticket with any hardware vendor, that's usually the first question, as well as any of the stability issues behind it.

We wanted to make sure that we could rule that out on a currency, on a release schedule, so we could say, "Yep. Because the servers are having scope, we're going to release it on this schedule. Once a year, twice a year, whatever it is." We didn't have a platform existing at that time to do that for us, and that's when we looked at OneView.

I was involved in the initial design. So a few things we generally look at from the engineering space are:

• How do we scale?
• How do we manage this?
• How do we manage the currency?
• How do we expand on it if we need to change the footprint and change direction?
• Can we do this easily, or is this a tear down or rebuild?

We didn't evaluate other options for this space. OneView is kind of the direction given by HPE, and we were using HPE servers. We didn't really have any necessity to look at other vendors.

I would definitely consider it for a colleague who had the same challenges as we did. Obviously, different companies have different challenges. But if they are dealing with similar challenges with regards to a fragmented footprint and currency-wise, OneView is a nice choice. It is:

• Visually appealing
• Easy to use
• Easy for managing servers going forward
• Easy for building servers at a profile level, versus going in traditionally and configuring all that stuff. It can automate all that stuff.

So if those were the challenges they are having, I would say OneView is a good place for them to look.

When selecting a vendor, I think relationship is very important. We want to make sure that our vendor is as intimate with us as we are with them. For them to understand our needs, we need to know what they can offer so that they can be transparent on what they can offer or provide partners that could offer the service to help everything we need efficiently. So that's really number one for me.

It's a little bit of unfair analysis. We weren't able to take this solution to the max. We put it in. We did a small footprint. It worked very well. But could I tell you what would happen at 3,000 servers or 5,000 servers? I wouldn't have an answer for you on that one. There is probably the potential, but I don't have an answer.

OneView is the software stack that is running on top of Synergy and on top of the HPE Hyper Converged 380 solution. Customers who buy separate servers can install it, and all the various elements, themselves.

OneView is the one tool where you can manage your build environment, the hyper-converged environment, or the Synergy environment yourself.

The user experience makes it easier for the administrator because new, not so new, and old environments will be managed in the same way. There is an efficiency thing as well because you don't have to be an expert in hybrid IT (private cloud and public cloud). It's the same interface for all of them.

I’d like to see more functionality going towards the hybrid IT. It is cloud economics in which we will see more and more of the private cloud and their own data centers as well.

The connection with Azure Stack, which was recently announced, demonstrates the connection between the local data center and Microsoft Azure. I see more and more features that will come together.

Can't be easier: eploy the OVA file, boot the appliance and enter the IP address and password... That's it!

I have experience with Versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. I have seen the evolution. Version 3.0 is a major step forward. Of course, Versions 4.0 and 5.0 will be better as well. That's the way it works in software.

I've been in IT a long time, so I realize that by attending conferences, such as a recent one, it’s not just for the announcements. For me, it's more of a networking thing, shaking hands, and getting to know people. At these events, you can meet the developers and the product managers. It opens up doors so you can become more independent of that one phone number. It’s quite important knowing people.

If you do the networking, you feel that the service you get is top notch. You get even more service. It makes it easier to get to the second and third line of support because you know what you're talking about. You get more information than just the marketing fluff. I know what it's about because I'm able to communicate directly with the hardware and software guys and the product managers.

One of my things I do in my company is publish a technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have. OneView is a simple installation. My nine-year-old daughter can do it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, “we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it. I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

You know all the good stuff and the not so good stuff about software, but OneView 3.0 is there now.

Just the ability to provision the servers with storage and network everything within one interface, not having to go into multiple interfaces to provision those pieces.

For us with the flexibility that it has given to us, I would rate it very highly. But, again, this was a game changing move for us, to go into something where we could easily provision systems, easily move those workloads from one physical enclosure to another physical enclosure without having to audit enclosures. It gave us a secret pane of glass.

My team did not actually manage storage before. When we brought this in, everything flows into OneView, so we managed the storage, we managed the fiber fabric and the compute. Really the only thing that we don't manage at this point is the Cisco switches. Everything else my team actually manages within that OneView interface.

So, for us, just the simplicity of being able to manage everything within that single pane of glass has been just huge for us. A lot of time savings for us. Being able to take that profile, and just making a copy of it, and just deploy stuff rapidly again, as opposed to doing it one server at a time has really taken and given some of my team more time to do some of the more proactive stuff.

So, I would have to say for us, personally, at our company, it's been a ten. I think it's also made it a little simpler for us to actually deploy systems. It's also given it the ability to move workloads from one physical structure to another physical structure if they're all managed with the same OneView environment.

So, it's added some flexibility for us. We've shifted to BOOT from SAN because of it, where we're actually replicating some of that data from one data center to another and then utilizing OneView to create a profile just to bring those replicated lines back up at the second site.

Our company was actually part of a - I don't even know what they call it - but you sit down with HP, they talk to you about features that you would like to see with their next release, and then actually a few months later they brought us into the HP campus and they actually showed us some of the things they were doing with the next release of the OneView.

Some of the things that we said at that time was better ability to do firmware. So, we obviously follow a chain-management process. Within that chain-management process we have to be able to show, "Hey, here's the list of servers that need this firmware," and then also give a report afterwards saying, "Hey, here are those lists of servers and here's their firmware now, but they're up-to-date."

So those were some of the things that we were asking, it was just some improvements on reporting and then improvements on how we do the patch process, in general, for firmware and drivers and things like that. So, that's really what we were looking for, and those were things that they were showing us that there's going to be possibly capabilities in the future release.

We've been on it only for about two and a half years, but it's been a game-changer for us. I really like it. It's a really good product for us.

We've really had very few issues with it. Initially stability, as far the application being up, has been good. We ran into a couple of issues here and there with the baselines for the firmware and not having enough space on the appliance itself to be able to have more than two baselines.

We actually work with HP, they had a way for us to expand that space where we could do more baselines, and so once that happened, we were pretty good.

Scalability has been good. We've actually scaled an additional, I want to say, five or six enclosures and added it to the environment, and we've really had no issues with it whatsoever as far as just bringing it in and increasing our storage footprint, or increasing our computer footprint, or whatever it's been.

It's really been pretty seamless for us. I mean, once you get it in, it really reads all the information for you and then you've got it. So it's been good.

We have used technical support, like I was mentioning with the space issue that we've had. We've used technical support just in general, OneView included, just on some of the ways that we wanted to actually do our profiles, so we could do that replication between sites. So, we did engage with them in things like that.

So I'll be honest, in my role, I'm not really doing the face-time with that. My team has not really ever come to me with any kind of issues. We actually have an account support manager from HP who is specific for the OneView environment that we own.

So typically what they'll do is they'll open up a ticket with HP, but then they'll send that information to the ASM and he'll really get things moving if things are stagnant for us.

So, before that we just had C7000 enclosures and we were just logging into each OA and just doing profiles individually per enclosure. So, now with OneView we create the profiles, but then we have ten enclosures included into that system.

We can just move stuff where we want. We didn't have that capability before. We never linked our C7000s, so each C7000 had its own profiles and its own OA that we had to login.

The setup was pretty straightforward. So to be honest, at the end, we brought in HP services to do the implementation of OneView. Obviously, we sat there with them and got an understanding of what they were doing and what the product did and how you installed it.

It's just basically a virtual client, so it wasn't really all that difficult to set up.

We actually looked at UCS and HP. We were looking for a converged environment, but we really didn't want just a canned approach to that.We had some limitations from our networking side on what gear they would allow us to use. We're a Cisco shop for networking. And, so most of the HP converge systems come with their own network and everything. We couldn't use the network.

So, we really worked with HP and they worked with us, and we actually came up with a custom converged environment where we used Cisco for the networking. But then, it's a great powerful storage and everything else is what they had.

We built a new data center. We needed something that was going to be a little more progressive than just racking a server, racking a server, building an application. We needed the capability to do site-to-site replication on not just virtual machines, but physical hardware. That's why we looked at the two systems.

To be honest with you, OneView was the deciding factor on going with HP, opposed to the other vendor, because with the other vendor, like I was saying, you had to go to the origin. This is mine. And we want something that we can just do everything in one pane and be done.

First and foremost when selecting a product, its got to fit within our environment. So, it can't be something that's kind of left out there that's just way off of what we do with standards and things like that.

We've been an HP shop for a long time. We've been in an enclosure shop for a long time. So, familiarity was another piece. Trying to teach your team, or have your team try to learn new equipment or new technologies that are not in line with what they're already doing can be a very large undertaking. I think familiarity and just a fit within our environment are a couple of the keys that we really look at.

So, I'm an X86 person. We also have an AIX environment, as well,along with Linux. They are obviously on power, so IBM for the AIX stuff. On X86, we're all HP hardware.

Obviously, we use Cisco, we use Brocade, Citrix, Microsoft. Those are our short list of vendors that we deal with a lot.

I would just say, "Make sure you do your diligence. Make sure you look at every aspect of what you're going to be bringing in. Make sure that none of those pieces are going to be in any kind of conflict, or harder for you to manage or take care of.

Go with the one that fits your company that you can manage. There is less of a market curve for your company. At the end of the day, that's time spent on non-work, or non-proactive, or any of that stuff.

You're spending time trying to learn a new environment, or a new system when you still need to be doing work that you're doing.

So, I would just say, make sure you vet out the whole environment and not just one piece of it.