HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

At present, we are using Gen 7, 8. We have used Gen 10 for some of our customers.

We use the solution for providing hotel support. We're into the hotels of mostly Windows operating system, Oracle and SQL database.

Performance and reliability are the most valuable features. 

We have encountered problems. The most pressing issue is that downloads depend at present on the current period. Secondly, in respect of the iLO access license page, iLO features should be included with the server. 

I have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for more than 10 years.

The scalability is fine.

HPE technical support is sufficiently good. Support as a side of the business can be purchased. 

The initial setup was easy.

The deployment time varies with the configuration, something which does not take more than two hours. While installing the operating system is a discussion of its own, the actual configuration is easy to do. 

We did not make use of consultants or resellers for the deployment. 

The size of the staff required for the deployment varies with the configuration. It takes just a day to install a single server, but nearly two or three days if making use of visualization and multiple operations. 

The solution comes with a one time perpetual license which is included with the server. It entails costs beyond that of the standard fee. 

The solution is mostly deployed on private cloud. 

I can safely state that we have more than 100 users making use of the solution, since we have installed more than 10 or 20 servers to different locations.

The basic package can include iLO features.

I rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers as a nine out of ten.

We use it for all of our needs. We use it for our servers, appliances, and virtualization. We have Gen8 and Gen10 models.

Its management, IOs, and stability are the most valuable features. It works fine. 

It has all the features of a typical server. All that can be done has already been done. 

The scalability of Gen8 models should be improved. They can also improve its price.

I have been using this solution for five or six years.

It is very stable.

Gen8 models are not as scalable as Gen10. You can't get parts for Gen8, but you can get parts for Gen10.

We have about 2,000 users, and they all use these servers.

It is fairly decent. It is straightforward most of the time. It takes less than a day for a server.

We installed them ourselves. The number of people required depends on how many servers you are deploying. 

The hardware should be cheaper.

HPE servers are pretty decent. We will definitely keep using them until their end of life. I am quite satisfied with this solution.

I would rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers an eight out of ten.

We use it for the 12 VMs we have on it. We are using VMware.

It's very useful.

It's easy to upgrade, and it is very easy to take care of the firmware upgrades.

With a complete bootable CD, we can do the upgrades quite remotely and pretty easily.

A black mark that we felt with HPE is that it failed within four to six months of use, even after it was addressed with HPE. 

The implementation should be simplified, it is not straightforward.

The product should be better tested before they send it to the end-user.

The stability needs improvement.

Support could be improved to be faster in responding.

We just purchased HPE ProLiant DL Servers six months ago.

We are using the latest version.

At this point in time, I would not say that it is a very stable product, because of the bad experience that we had.

It is scalable to a certain extent. Not very much, but at least 20% scalable.

We have 300 users in our organization.

We contacted technical support for the issues that we were facing. 

I found them to be quite slow in their response.

We could put up with the delay because it had just been brought in, and the applications were being transferred.

In fairness, it could have been because of the COVID issue. But I found them to be pretty slow.

Previously we were using Dell, and we switched from Dell to HPE.

We have been very dedicated users of Dell and never had any issues with them. Unfortunately, we had to switch to HPE for a specific reason.

We switched from Dell because of some specific requirements that could not be met with Dell. Also, we switched because of some financial issues. Dell was more expensive and we couldn't afford it at that time.

It wasn't straightforward.

We had some issues with some failures initially. Though it was taken care of by HPE, we still had some failures, which was surprising.

We have a team of ten admins, engineers, managers, and data entry guys to maintain and deploy this solution.

We had the help of the HPE service providers.

We have purchased this solution and it is under warranty. It is more economical than some other products.

We will continue to use this solution, as we have purchased it and can't afford to just throw it away. If we continue to have further issues, we will consider changing it over.

With my current experience, I could not recommend this product to others.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

The most valuable features for us are remote management, high load, and resilience. We're a small team but we have servers in Moscow, Milan, and other places. This is a solution that allows us to be in those different places.

We only have support staff in North America and in Europe, so it enables us to offer support globally in our other offices. If there's an issue in the Sydney office, we can log on remotely, needing very little work. The main benefit is less manpower, which means that if there's an issue at 3:00 in the morning in the US, I can do the work rather than having to get somebody else to do the work.

I'd like to see more features in the iLO as it currently only provides a basic overview. Sometimes the part or serial numbers are missing, for example. We've had issues where power supplies or hard drives have become defective and the information gets pulled back into the error logs. We then have to physically look into the server. This is highly inconvenient and an annoyance which could be solved with more iLO features.

We get the odd hard drive or power supply or general failure issues, but there aren't major stability issues we've noticed.

If we've got clusters with a specific chip set, we can't easily introduce more once the chip becomes end-of-line. We have to build an entirely new cluster and migrate things over with the way we've implemented it.

We have technical support through a third party and through HP. It seems relatively straightforward -- just go online, fill in the details, and you normally get contacted in 30-60 minutes.

I've primarily been with HP throughout my career. I've used IBMs and Dells in the past, very briefly, but I've never really got on with them. I find that the support and the tools that come with HP servers are far better.

I've only been with the company about 18 months. The majority of the setup was done prior to me joining.

Make sure you get what you actually need rather than overpaying for something. Consider the different chips and memory that you can buy off the shelf. Make sure you're not over-spec or under-spec. Take your time.

I would say it's well documented and you can find exactly what the configuration is easily as well as the drivers and other documentation that they require to get a junior staff member up and running on the platform.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

I would say that for us, as we're moving to more of a cloud based solution, we're looking for ways that you can take machines that you can't put in a private cloud instance and how those can be managed from a single user interface.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't break.

This is something that we're going into right now with HP as we've built out a stack of these machines. In the future we're planning on moving to more of a cloud based architecture.

They want to add more sites and it's just not good for us to add in another rack of equipment for every site.

Technical support gets to the parts where we need it. Like any product, it fails occasionally, right? But we built the system to survive and HP is still there to support us.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Work with HP to pilot before you go buy it.

We value the reliability of these servers.

These servers have provided good scale and performance for our environment.

• Remote management – the iLO 3 (and 4) are still lagging behind DELL in terms of features and value for money and they still do not have a HTML5 remote console.
• Firmware reporting is inconsistent – iLO provides no way of loading new firmware for devices other than the iLO itself. iLO has a very basic disk and RAID reporting with no configuration options at all.
• Out of our many HPE Proliant servers we have had very few failures outside of the common disk failures. We’ve had a few motherboards die but only a very low percentage.

We have used this solution for over three years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. These servers have been pretty stable over the years with only one or two minor firmware issues.

One issue is the way HPE do their drive cage expansion. With two 8-bay cages you need to use an SAS expander which adds cost and requires a PCI-e slot. Only the factory-ordered 25-bay model has this built-in. Other vendors such as DELL typically have the SAS expander built into the backplane which is better in my opinion.

Technical support is good. Most support tickets are handled quickly and replacement parts are generally quick to arrive. Sometimes dealing with language difficulties in their helpdesk can be problematic and often there is downtime with “please send me your logs” back and forth. Hopefully this will improve with the new iLO remote support functionality.

We have used previous HPE/HP generations since G1 as far as I can remember. We typically switch at the time of an asset refresh.

Setup was mostly straightforward, although as I mentioned, the iLO could do with providing more control, e.g. RAID/disk configuration like DELL have. Their intelligent provisioning does help a lot, particularly on their Gen9 range.

The worst part about HPE hardware is their pricing and licensing model. Prices are typically 20% higher than other vendors such as DELL and many of their advanced features are licensed separately, such as iLO advanced and Oneview, adding further cost.

We evaluated some other options. While we were purchasing a lot of HPE hardware we did consider other vendors but it isn’t always easy when you have invested in HPE tools to manage your server hardware. We have considered DELL and Lenovo.

Get multiple quotes, shop around. Keep your management/monitoring tools as vendor agnostic as possible to allow you to be more flexible in your hardware vendors.

We are system integrators in a fiber optics company. We use this solution mainly as high computational devices, but also we use it as a storage device.

The deployment is data center-based.

This solution is perfect. From the time of purchase, it was state-of-the-art, and still, after five, 10 years, they still meet our demands extremely well.

It is easy to use and it also has good performance.

The latest generation has made good improvements in power consumption. G6, and G7, which is approximately 10-year-old technology, have some issues with power consumption.

The installation could be simplified.

I would also like to pay less for the out-of-the-box product, but everything else is okay.

I have been working with HPE ProLiant DL Servers for ten years.

We are using generations six to nine. G6, G7, G8, and G9.

The stability of this product is very good.

We deployed it in our network, and our network is the backbone of the company. Through our backbone, we serve millions of end users, but indirect users are internet service providers that use our services, which is approximately 50.

I have never contacted technical support because everything worked perfectly.

The installation is reasonably complex.

The length of time it takes to deploy depends on the software that we are installing, but it can take a couple of days, approximately.

We have two engineers and one technician to maintain it.

We had the help of a system integrator.

The iLO (integrated lights out) license is very expensive, but the functionality you receive is worth it.

We are fully satisfied with this solution and I recommend it for others who are interested in using it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers a 10 out of 10.

What is good about HPE servers is that you have a consistent way and how to manage them across all the lines. You don't have to learn something for one type of server and then have to learn something else for a different type of server. If you have different types of servers, you can always build on the knowledge you have and you have a unified way to approach things in configuration, in setting up, maintaining, and so on and so forth.

The organization is always hamstrung by the staff people they have available to run these systems. If you have a trained staff, you don't want to throw all this training overboard just to get a new server. You have an evolving but steadily moving ecosystem of how you get these things set up, connected, maintained and so on, so forth. That's probably even more valuable than just, "Hey, competitor A or B has 2% more efficiency or 2% more power to deliver".

It's always the next generation of hardware, of course: Who does the better job? You also can look at things and say, "Hey, we were going all blades. We were going with virtual connect.”, and do specific things in that way. We learned certain lessons doing that, of course.

For the next generation, we probably won't have that many blades. We will probably revert to rack-mounted servers, but have bigger servers instead of the smaller servers. That also evolves with the workloads you have. Over the period of time we typically run these systems, such as five years, there's a lot of change in what the users request from us. Of course, there are new developments. For example, before we started VDI, we said, “OK, if we want to do VDI going forward, we probably want to incorporate some GPU into that.” That would probably lead to new architecture and then we want to do other stuff like high-performance computing, as well, on that. The next generation probably would look completely different from what we have now.

We have been using HPE servers for a very long time. The current implementation was done in 2013 and 2014, but we have been using HPE servers for 20 years or more. It was not necessarily called HPE at that time but one of the companies they acquired over the decades.

Stability is a non-issue. As long as you don't touch anything, nothing will really happen. If you update everything here and there, you have to really pay attention. We have a complex setup with storage and servers and networking, storage networking and so on and so forth. Once you change one component, all the others might blow up in your face if you don't do it correctly. Especially in the storage space, we rely heavily on HPE to mix and match, make sure that the matrix is correct to do all of the maintenance on that level.

Scaling is fairly easy. With the blades, I think the only barrier here is, once you fill up the enclosure, you need a new enclosure. That's the primary barrier. As long as you can grow inside the enclosure, that's a non-issue. Otherwise, you have a steeper investment, but then again, it scales up from a single server to the full enclosure, to the full rack.

We never had to go that way, though. Everything we did always fit into one enclosure in one rack. We had two of them, spread across sites. Even in a situation where one of our data centers fails, we can still have all of the workload running out of the other data center. By the means of the software stack we have around it, that works without a mishap. You don't really even notice it with the storage and the virtualization layer. That all happens in the blink of an eye, automatically, which is very important for us. It’s also reproducible, of course. And, you can do it backwards, unlike some solutions, where you can failover but if you want to failback, you would need a myriad of highly skilled IT professionals to do that move back with data synchronization, but this solution really does it all.

Support on the hardware side is a little bit more challenging than on other sides because there are so many components involved, if you look at servers. There are many vendors who provide components to HPE. You have to mix and match everything. You really need a professional support organization with that to help you. If you do the wrong thing, do the wrong update, that might hamstring you with the whole operation because you don't get anywhere, anymore.

The setup is quite straightforward. It's really a bunch of servers but, of course, that involves getting all of the components together, having everything configured to order and then having it configured to the software stack. We incorporated HPE partners to do that for us and then we took over and said, "Okay, from now on, we involve this system until its end of lifetime." We went from the one version of the hypervisor to the current version of the hypervisor, and we're going to the next, and the next, and the next. Setting up is the first step but from that point on, you can take it yourself and drive it yourself.

For the blade offerings, most of the competitors have similar capabilities. However, they probably have evolved them only within the last five years, whereas I would say HPE has a much longer runway into that. They have a much more established, esteemed platform there. The C class of BladeSystems is something that's there for years now. I think we have the second procurement of those. At the end of its lifetime, we're running it for 10 years, whereas others have changed their blade strategies two or three times. I think that's the worst thing you can do, if you have to change it on there.

The C7000 and C3000 have been around for 10 years, maybe 15 years, already. Everything that came afterwards, such as Synergy or the Superdome X, they all build on top of that. The C9000 and whatever they call the Synergy enclosure, it really takes the best from the established path and then just adds the latest technology to that.

If you have that knowledge and ability, and you can leverage that, you have a big advantage over all the others who come to the market with a new solution and try to find customers.

For the server technology, most of the features you can nowadays find with most of the vendors, so they're probably at the stage where HPE was five years ago. The ecosystem is so mature and still evolving. There's nothing like, "Hey we have this feature, we don't change it." The management, the procurement, the provisioning, all of that is really kicking off going forward. Probably with the next generation, I’d gave it a higher rating.