HPE OneView Reviews

OneView is a tool that we use primarily to speed up the deployment operations of infrastructure. We use it to eliminate human error in deployments and it allows us to compute much faster. It gives us a very easy program for the REST API interface. To summarize, the benefits are speed of deployment and reduced errors

In terms of our role as a HPE reseller, we are able to provide a distinct solution in the market place. It really helps our customers do a better job deploying infrastructure faster. One of the things we do is provide skills transfer.

I would like to see some GUI based features around decommissioning hardware. The management tools in the existing HPE infrastructure were good, but they were aging. That's really where OneView kind of made their mark from the ground up with an all new solution. They actually started from the ground up to just understand that our existing management tools were aging and we needed to improve that. That was a big thing to us.

The solution is pretty stable. We are in revision 3. It has been over three years now, and every revision has gotten better. One of the advantages of OneView is that even if something happens, it doesn't affect the work.

Scalability is decent. They've recently released a tool called OneView mobile dashboard. This allows you to aggregate a number of OneView appliances. The benefit is that the OneView implementation can be in separate data centers and you can aggregate things. Individual scalability was already decent and then with the addition of One View mobile dashboard, it has significantly improved.

Technical support is pretty good and it is getting better all the time. When the tool set first launched, the HPE support organization had some challenges. From what I've heard from customers, the consensus is that the HPE support staff is getting better.

At the time, we were managing our HPE blade systems with Virtual Connect Manager and an on-board administrator. This was the normal HPE tool set that existed at the time.

When choosing a vendor, support is important. As a re-seller, when we take a product to market and sell it to costumers, we really need to be confident that we've been able to put it through its paces. We want to know about the testing and quality assurance ourselves. We don’t want to take the vendor's word for it.

Once we've decided to move forward with that partnership, it becomes important for us that we have a deep bench system behind us. If we run out of runway, we want to know that we've got a partner to resolve things for us.

The initial setup was straightforward.

HPE was a big one on our short list. We also have reseller relationships with Dell, Nutanics, and Pure Storage. We represent about 50 different vendors. We chose HPE, because we feel like they have the most complete kind of eco-system level vision.

If you have HPE compute in place today, you should definitely look at using OneView. If you're looking at selecting a compute vendor, I think HPE OneView is a compelling reason to go with HPE.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass. Also, it is easy to use.

It makes us more agile. It makes integration and things of that nature much easier.

Off the top of my head, I don't have any comment.

Stability is excellent.

One of the great parts about it is the scalability.

I have not used technical support.

It's a particular tool to help us in managing our environment. So, it was something that we needed to have. Just something you know when you manage your environment that you have to have a tool like that. It's very good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

To be honest, the price point is pretty spot on.

I would definitely advise them to work with HPE. Their products speak for themselves. They do what they say they're going to do. And HPE, changing the way they have over the last couple years, it's been amazing. I've enjoyed it immensely.

The most important feature of the latest OneView version 3 is to include the option to make calls directly to HPE.

The previous software HPE Insight Remote was old and complicated; it didn't work. When I told the system to discover my servers, it found some systems but others were completely ignored. In the newer version of OneView, I hope and pray that this feature works better. At a recent HPE conference, I saw the live demo that showed me the options. When this software works like what I saw in the demo, it will be a great feature for the new options, to get one software for all that stuff.

The centralized management and monitoring features are most valuable in this solution.

We also use OneView for monitoring all our iLOs to see in one place that all of our servers are fine.

The blade enclosure management for zoning is another benefit.

They need to add some other storage systems like MSA or P2000. That would be a great feature. At this time, they are only planning to add 3PAR. All of the others are third-party. 

I have not given it a perfect rating because some features are missing like adding other storage systems and providing email notifications.

I have used this product for two years. I worked with version 1.16 and updated to the latest version.

It is really stable. In two years, I have had only one crash and it was my fault. However, we use it for really small options. We don't use it like other companies do, i.e., for zoning, server profiles, patch management, etc. We use it only for the small things such as monitoring purposes.

Currently, we have only 33 servers but we are looking to expand.

The initial setup was very easy.

There were no other vendors on our list besides HPE.

OneView is a really good option and it makes our life easy. In other words, you can shop around but this is a good thing. 

I'm really happy with the tool. It's a great thing.

For OneView, it's probably two things.

• Having the single pane of glass interface into the actual solutions that we're deploying and using.
• Above and beyond that, actually utilizing the OneView Global Dashboard. That's what we're utilizing to show everything.

We don't have a lot of installations, but it's there to show the customers that if they have multiple installations of OneView, they can integrate it all into a single pane of glass, so they can manage their infrastructure more effectively.

It keeps us from having to go and do things manually. So, the benefits are:

• firmware updates
• OS deployments
• managing the blade infrastructure that we have
• being able to change the blade infrastructure on the fly
• going in and changing server profiles
• updating the firmware levels

So, it makes it easier for us to do all that as well for our customers.

Honestly, I was just working with one of the Beta versions in one of the hands-on labs and I think from a management functionality, it's very complete with regards to the hardware and what the different offerings have as far as management is concerned.

Maybe it could be a little faster. Also, streamlining the code a little bit, making it a little bit more responsive. I noticed as we were doing this in a virtualized environment here in the labs, that it seems to occasionally have choke points that slow it down a little bit and then it speeds back up.

So far, it's been rock-solid. No problems whatsoever. It's run. Every update is applied, no issues. It just works.

Well, like I said, with Global Dashboard, we have the ability to aggregate that all under a single pane of glass. We've only got one instance, but I've seen it where they've got numerous instances underneath that and it seems to all work just fine.

I haven't used the technical support.

Well, like I said, we've got multiple vendors. Actually I came from an IBM background initially, but also a Lenovo background and then I took on the HP architecture products, just because they knew I had a background in X86.

I'm the one who set it all up in our lab. It was very easy. Very straightforward. So, it goes in very simply. We have it running in our virtualization forum and it manages everything we have there.

I think in general, we looked for responsiveness, and the ability to get to the people you need to get to when you have an issue or a problem. Obviously product quality, I think is going to be another huge consideration. Then for me, reselling this, a lot of the management products are going to be a big key.

Take your time. Learn the features. Learn how it integrates in your environment and it'll serve you well.

Twice a year we do a server buy. We get in maybe 20 blade chassis. So, we would have a significant amount of servers to actually provision. We use OneView to change all the buyer settings, and it stops us having to go into each server and do it manually, which normally takes about ten minutes per server. However, we can just use OneView, do it all together, and have the whole thing setup and ready to be provisioned by the OS. 

That is what we use it for, and it is performing really well.

• The speed that we can provision servers
• The automatic case logging with HPE 

They are pretty good.

The most valuable thing is the speed, in which we can provision servers, and the remote support, which is automatically set up as well. The remote support automatically logs service calls and support cases with HPE, which is really good.

One thing which is missing is that you can't actually log a support call yourself. So, it's automatic, if a machine has gone wrong. However, sometimes it does not actually log a call for you, so it would be nice to actually be able to click "submit a case" within OneView instead of having to go out, login to Insight Remote Support's website and do it from there. That would be a good feature.

I know there is a new version (v.4), but we are using v.3.1, which is pretty stable. We have not had any downtime in our six months of use.

You can throw as many servers at it as you want. So, there is no problem there.

I have not used technical support yet.

We did not have a previous solution.

We needed a solution for a long time just to save time, because if you are doing 120 servers and having to go into each one, boot it up, wait for it to reboot, and change settings, then you might make mistakes if you are doing that many servers. So, just to have it all automated and being able to do it in one go, it is quite good. 

The initial setup was straightforward enough. You just need the VM, then load the software on and away it goes.

By myself; in-house.

Before looking into the solution, I was looking for something which could buy us changes, but at the time, HPE had some other solutions, but they were actually quite expensive to buy. So, when OneView came along, it was kind of reasonable in terms of price for licenses, etc.

No. We are a big HPE site. We use HPE SA and HPE OO for OS provisioning.

Go for it, because its ease of use and setting it up. Once setup, then it is more or less, forget about it. It just works away in the background.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: ease of use. If you are talking about an application like OneView, this was ease of use. The desktop and the dashboard are actually quite good. We have the dashboard up on a big screen, and you can actually see when things go wrong or if there are any faults with any of the servers. The backup is automated as well, so the appliance is quite good.

The anticipation of improvement comes from our partner. They have experience with other customers, most of the time bigger customers. They said this is a good direction to start heading in, it's future proof and it will simplify management of your equipment. So we're trusting the partner.

Having one platform to monitor and to access or configure all the servers or the 3PAR, etc.

It's rather simple to use, and that's very important for us. Being an IT person - I'm working for a chemical organization - we have to know a lot, but we can't be specialized in anything. So it's good that it's simple, that we can use it for just normal daily work.

I cannot say. Maybe there will be, but my experience is not deep enough at this moment.

It's a stable product, it's working fine. 

Even thought we just started using it, I'm sure about the scalability. That's also the reason why we started with it. It will become one product we can use more and more, we can add other items to it. It also looks it will be a standard inside HPE. They will keep on using this for a long time.

To be honest, I'm not really communicating with HPE support on this product.

We had some issues when we were implementing 3PAR, then we were communicating and the communication was really good. It was a hard issue, but they really put the effort in it to supporting us and to bring a solution. I appreciated it. Even if it was not a nice time, they did everything that was possible to fix it.

We have not been using it so long actually. It was implemented by our partner a few months ago and now we are starting to put all our equipment inside OneView.

At this time I would say it's an eight out of 10, which is rather good, because the product is working. It's implemented at our site and we can use it without many problems, and it is being used - and that's very important. Very often you implement a product and there it stops. But it's really being used. I'm looking at it, very often. I will not say every day, but often.

In the latest version, I like the way that everything's been consolidated and brought together. One single pane of glass for management.

It's easier for the customer to manage in terms of reporting and getting their information out. They don't have to switch to different screens like they do with solutions from other vendors. They don't have to overlay extra, additional software on top to get the information they need.

I'd like to see more integration across Hypervisor and 3PAR storage and other storage products.

It's very stable. It's fine. Never had an issue.

Scalability is fine. No problems. We've got a customer that runs it across three data centers, five 3PARs. So, it's all good.

Technical support is above average. Sometimes they're a little bit slow on the 3PAR stuff to get back to us as a partner when we're trying to decode updates and things like that. There are a lot of code updates going on around the world at the same time. That's why I'm not saying average. It's high above average.

We always sell OneView to our customers, but they use other management tools.
For us, choosing a vendor is about the scale of the solution, how stable it is and how easy it is for a customer to move from one solution to the other.

Setup is straightforward. We are Service One certified partners, so we can install.

We have tested HDS, CMC, and Nimble.

Use HPE to your advantage. Get the trial licenses, see how it works and then you'll be happy with it once you roll it out.