HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

The fact that they are consistent. I don't have to relearn for the 80 sites I support.

Stability and reliability. It's rare that it fails and, when it does, we have HPE support, with a four hour turnaround. It gets fixed.

I would like to see the simplicity of having the option of loading with something like SmartStart instead of having to make the external connection. There are issues with the startup that make it a little cumbersome. It takes us more time. Even though hardware and support might be rated higher, considering how much time we spend setting things up, that impacts us a lot. That's where the points get taken off my rating.

Scalability is about the number of drives and the number slots for memory and storage. We put in what we want. If it's not right, we put in more.

We have used technical support, and it can always be better. But everyone can. Sometimes I feel like I'm dealing with someone who is reading from a script, rather than with someone who understands the technology.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution, because of lack of driver support. In the new Windows version, some drivers don't work with old MSAs and you have to get new ones. We used a previous generation of HPE servers before this.

When choosing a vendor, we look for support, reliability, durability, and not something that is end-of-life in a year.

I was involved in the installation. We ran it from the SmartStart CD to the online connection. (I don't know what they call it now.) It came with a supply kit and we could install it without an external connection. That's where we support it. In gaming, there is no connection to the outside world.

I would recommend HPE, but you have to be careful. Check if everything is compatible with what you currently have. You might upgrade part of a server, but not all of it. There can simply be incompatibility issues.

It's just a solid server. You put it up and it just kind of runs. It's not a whole bunch of jumping through hoops or anything to configure it. It's pretty straightforward. It's really all you can say about the ProLiant servers.

It gave me more insight to our actual data usage on our disk arrays. Before that, we were using the P2000 G3 disk array from HPE MSA series; just not a whole lot of insights in that.

Providing areas with room for improvement is a tough one. We're running AMD right now, so we're not running the latest gen. We're running a gen 8, something DL series. I honestly can't provide areas with room for improvement until I see the next version of what that's going to be. I mean, it’d be nice if AMD got off their butts and provided a new chip for us to use, but right now it's all Intel.

I wish there was a clearer-cut way to back up the BIOS and restore other machines. That'd be really the biggest thing I could see an improvement on, which I think they did fix in gen 9 and 10.

I rack them and throw them in there. Once you put them on a rack, as long as you don't mess with it, they just run.

With the DL series redundancy line, just keep throwing them in the rack and plug it into your cluster and it goes. You're not stuck on a blade mid-planner waiting for all your blades to go out of the mid-plane on the enclosure with half of the access; that's why we moved to the DL series. They give us that reliability and we can do redundancy with it; unlike the blade enclosures, where you have to purchase two separate blade enclosures to get genuine redundancy, which is a very steep purchase.

The technical support leaves a lot to be desired. I find it amazing that I paid for extra for support for the 3PAR and I wait on the phone for 30 minutes. For that extra support, when I'm paying for the premium support; so it's US-side support, US-based support, I should mention. If I call the regular number without the extra support, I talk to someone instantly.

It's, "What care plan are you on? What care plan are you on?" That's the question of HPE, "Are you on the SA plan?" "Are you on this plan?" You got to dig through this matrix of plans to figure out which phone are we going to call. It's absurd.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do all of the implementation myself.

The most valuable features of HPE ProLiant DL Servers are very high quality.

The price of HPE ProLiant DL Servers could improve.

I have been using HPE ProLiant DL Servers for approximately one and a half years.

I have found the HPE ProLiant DL Servers to be stable.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are scalable.

We have more than 50 clients using this solution.

The support from HPE ProLiant DL Servers is very good, they are helpful.

The price of HPE ProLiant DL Servers is reasonable, but because of covid and other factors, the price could be reduced. The license is paid annually.

I would recommend this solution to others.

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

Virtualized servers, failover production and dev/test environments of Linux and Windows guests.

We have been able to virtualize many physical servers into virtual servers running on a smaller number of physical hosts. This has allowed us to consolidate and reduce our carbon footprint in the data center and have a higher ROI on Capex purchases. Also becomes easier to introduce new hardware as part of replacement cycles as VMs are hardware independent.

• iLO gives hardware information, preempting imminent failures.
• Redundancy features provide hot-swap ability for drives and power supplies and automatic rebuilding of RAIDs.

Boot-up time should be reduced. Restarting a server at any time is a stress-filled occasion, and waiting around for the server to come back on is agonizing. 10GB and 40GB ethernet connections are essential for virtualization workloads and consolidation.

Stability can be adversely affected if non-HP certified RAM is used, e.g. Kingston value RAM has failed a few times, bringing an entire server down.

Excellent, the support is one area where I can have no complaints. Whenever a hardware failure has been detected, HP have responded in good time and the part was delivered within the agreed SLA. Having said that, the original parts availability outside the established channels also makes it easy (cheaper) to maintain, especially in non-critical environments i.e. dev and test.

I've used HP servers predominantly so do not have much else to compare them with.

It's simple. Use the included SmartStart media, and it seamlessly integrates with the OS of choice.

In-house. I have found the rack mounting kits more of a challenge then the installation of the OS/hypervisor, that is how simple implementation is. Also, keep an eye on which version of the SmartStart media you use i.e. x86 vs. x64 as that limits what kind of OS media can be utilized.

ROI is difficult to say because it depends on the type of implementation e.g. is it a new deployment or consolidating an existing an existing one or simply replacing like for like. What I would say, is that the platforms are very stable and once setup, will most likely outlast any hardware replacement cycle in place.

Ensure that you get the hardware support with 24x7 four hour response if this is a high availability production environment, and purchase appropriate iLO licenses if needed.

The only thing I don't like about them is that if/when you have to restart it, it takes a long time to come back on. As the sea of sensors have increased in recent generations, the time has become longer.

Define your storage needs in advance and then plan the disks accordingly. Suggest that if flash storage is financially feasible, then invest in that as the performance benefits are worth it.

Reliability is a valuable feature for us. We use the DL380s throughout our data centers and they've proven to be very reliable.

We've been using them for several years, and because we've been using them throughout our data centers, they've been uniform. All of our techs are familiar with them, and I think it's just familiarity with the servers which has benefited us a lot.

We're going to the hyper converged area. I've seen OneView. I'm very pleased with how that interface looks. We saw SimplyView in a demonstration and Synergy. So until I get my hands on it, I don't know that I can say I'm looking for more improvements.

We've been using them for several years.

We are very impressed with the stability. The only time they've really failed on us is when the cooling in the area failed one time. Literally, the temperatures got so hot that they physically melted. That's probably the only time they failed.

Right now, we're looking into some of the newer hybrid architectures, hyper converged. So we're looking at keeping our older servers but trying to scale them out. So that's what we're looking at now.

The technical support has been very valuable. We had a storage array go bad, and they worked with us to get that storage array up and running again. So, yes, very valuable.

Prior to what we were using, I think we were just using all of the firmware-based solutions for setting up our arrays.

If you use a different supplier or a different company for your firmware or your hardware, then it has a different interface. It was just complicated. If you're using HPE for everything, it just made it so much simpler.

I was not involved in the initial setup, although my predecessor was. I've stood up servers and storage arrays from scratch, and I think it's not that complex. I think the user interface that HPE provides is straightforward. It takes away the complexity. That's my feeling, anyway.

We've looked at moving away from HPE in the past, and we were lured away. But HPE, for the requirements of our customers, for our own requirements, especially security, was key.

I think security is one of the first things we look at, and HPE has that covered.

We evaluated Dell. We chose to stay with HPE but we almost switched to Dell.

I mean, look at what other solutions are out there, and look up what your requirements are. For us, it's met all of our requirements. I don't think that the others could do that.

Scalability and being able to customize the service in just the way that we really want it.

The benefits are that we can customize what we want. We're able to tailor the actual service itself to our specific requirements. This is opposed to trying to get something off-the shelf which doesn't quite fit and then we have to make compromises.

I’d like to see a lower price. That's not the whole 20% difference of why I gave it an 8. One of the negative things that we find is that the configuration tools are sometimes not easy to use. That contributes to the detriment of the score.

I would rank scalability at about 80%.

I have used support. There are certain proprietary information elements which are clearly owned by HPE which are always nice to look at when troubleshooting. There are some items that we understand that they can't share. From a technical point of view, it would be nice to have more visibility and scale.

I was involved in the setup. I think our first installation was okay. When we are buying new models, sometimes the support doesn't feel like it's quite there. That might not necessarily be on the HPE side of things. This lack of support might be from some of the products that we use with it.

We go through software purchasing cycles and we know roughly when, in the lifetime, we need to purchase certain key infrastructure components. We also have the ad hoc requests where we need to get a certain per-line, server-specific, full requirements, and then we buy as we need it.

When selecting a vendor, trust is the main issue. I'd suggest others seriously consider HPE as a service solution. Our experience has been pretty positive. Based upon that I, would recommend HPE products.

It has easy manageability, and with iLO we are able to do everything remotely.

It's just a computer server, so we just use them for whatever things we can't virtualize so it's nothing very special in that regard as far as what sets HPEs apart from somebody else's there.

We're looking forward to OneView management, stuff like that to keep it all in check. But there's not really anything specific. It will provide a single pane of glass for management instead of going out to 50 different servers and configuring things so you get, set up a template, or do the different things through OneView. Just kick it off and replicate and automate what you're doing.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I haven't had any issues with that at all.

I've used other platforms in the past, but nothing specific. We wanted to have a single pane of glass for management and have consistency as much as we can so we stick with one vendor overall between blades, between rack mounts, between everything.

Proliant, they're fine. I mean it's compute, it's pretty hard to mess it up these days.

There are several valuable features of these servers, including their reliability, the general standardization of components, expandability, price, and support. I think they're miles ahead of the competition in these areas.

I think that the main area of improvement would be in the price. The price only came down for us when we went to a dual vendor solution. We resorted to negotiating prices between HP and its competitors, and would have been nice to not have gone through that trouble to get a more competitive price.

We experienced no issues with the deployments.

The stability is great. They're always bugs with IT and the computers are there to test those. I wouldn't have a job otherwise. I'd say HP servers are generally more stable than the competitors.

They're very scalable.

We do most technical support in-house. If we do go to HP, the level of tech support will depend on the type of bug, who you're speaking to, how good the answer is, and how good the result is. Often you have to skip three layers of support before you can even get any assistance.

We have a multi-vendor network, but 99% of our kit is HP. We also use Dell and IBM equipment, but we chose HP for servers because it's just easier to support the platform. Multiple vendors need multiple hardware, and for multiple hardware, there are more update methods. They don't all work the same way and they're not all as reliable.