What needs improvement with HPE ProLiant DL Servers?

When you speak of any enhancements in the product, you need to shift to the tool's commercial mode. You get more features in the solution if you pour in more money. If a customer needs some features in the solution, they will have to buy it since certain features are not loaded by default in the server. With entry-level licenses, servers are shipped to customers free of cost. Customers need to pay if they want more and more features in the solution. Every OEM solution in the market, including HPE ProLiant DL, operates similarly. The overall cost of the product needs to be lower, as it is one of the areas of concern in the product.

There are concerns about the HPE team in the Southeast Asia region, suggesting a need for improvements in terms of responsiveness. There have been instances where the response time was slow, causing challenges during urgent situations. Its stability also needs to improve.

The product must provide time travel features. Oracle Flashback Database provides such features. If there’s an error, we can travel back in time and revert it. If someone imports a wrong request, we can ask the system to go back in time so that the system has no problem. Backup and recovery are the most important features.

HPE SmartStart was valuable for HPE ProLiant DL Servers. However, I believe it has been discontinued, considering your technical awareness of current developments. There is a feature called SmartStart, which refers to the HPE SmartStart CD provided by HPE. This CD was available until 2008. Now, in the present scenario, people are migrating from Server 2008 to Server 2019. Logically, according to the manufacturer, HPE, it's stated that SmartStart is not compatible with newer operating systems like 2019 or 2016. It doesn't work. However, I have personally performed a workaround. You can start by using the SmartStart CD to install Windows Server 2008 R2 as the base operating system and then proceed with upgrading it to Windows Server 2016. I have successfully implemented this approach on several servers, approximately 20 to 30 servers. I haven't encountered any issues so far. Why doesn't it cause problems? I believe that HPE is aware of this situation. Not every organization has the budget or resources to purchase new servers once the lifecycle ends. Therefore, HPE should provide some form of correction, such as upgrades or updated utilities, that can be used with these servers. By offering backward compatibility, at least until the G7 series, and supporting operating systems like SmartStart for these environments, it would greatly benefit clients. This approach would receive positive feedback for the company's support services.

They should improve the solution's built-in quality.

I would like the solution to improve its storage and performance. Also, I would like to replicate data between on-premises and cloud in future versions.

We have had issues with ProLiant's intelligent provisioning. Sometimes, the drivers do not come up, so we have to install them manually.

The licensing fees are expensive and have room for improvement.

I do not have any notes for improvement. I don't have a lot of visibility on every aspect at the moment. The setup could be a bit easier. The initial configuration process could be simpler.

The documentation for HPE ProLiant DL Servers has room for improvement. It should be updated. For example, it says on the documentation that this specific product or part number is supported. Still, when you ask the HPE team, the reply is that it's not supported, so HPE should update the information on the documentation.

The price of the solution could be less expensive to be more competitive.

I want to improve hyper-converged sites. We are mostly working with the DL series, however, now we are trying to work with more hyper-converged.

The servers should include OneView for intelligence provisioning.

I would like to replace a hard drive that might be saved on the fly, on the server that I'm using currently, but I can't do that. I'm forced to power off my virtual machine, turn off the server, disconnect it from the power, replace the drive, rebuild the storage, and power it on again. That's a lot of downtime, and it affects the services. I know that HP provides this kind of solution to another series for a bigger budget of course.

My customers are tilted toward GPU users, and the mixed version of the enabled hard drives require — flash drives, SSD, NNL, and PLAS — all mixed and matched in a single box. These are requirements I've already shared with the HPE account manager. Customers want the tiering concept inside a box, which is currently part of the storage system, but customers require it in a server. They want the operating system over PLAS and the IO-related things on SSD. The rest of their data is on NLSF.

We would like to see remote monitoring capabilities added. We are currently improving our automated monitoring for HPE servers using InfoSight.

I think the speed could be improved with OneView. At the moment, OpenManage is faster and has a better interface than HPE.

In the HPE ProLiant DL Servers generation nine, there was a problem when the expansion cards were installed on the server. There was only a small amount of room for the top expansion cards that hand could insert or remove the cables inside.

We have been experiencing a problem with the power pack. It gets fried and then we have to do a replacement. There is a challenge sometimes with having quick access to some of these components when you need them. It takes a lot of time to get spare parts from genuine sellers. You need the memories for servers. They're delivered. You put them in, and the system doesn't come up, so you have to return them. For me, that has been the major challenge. In the day-to-day running, there's always room for improvement. If you need assistance in real time, it would be helpful if there was such a room where someone could be there and help you solve the problem in real time. The number of people you are serving is increasing by the day, and they need immediate solutions to their issues. Sometimes you have limitations as to getting solutions to some of these issues that come up, but you are dependent on the information available to you. Being the product manufacturers also, I'm sure they have a lot of solutions to the different issues depending on the feedback they've been able to get from the field all across the world, especially those using their products. I think that would go a long way in helping.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers are customizable, but when you first deploy them, you basically have to rebuild configurations on them. This is true for large orders. But for small orders, you will be tied up with previous configurations of some other brand like Dell.

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.

They should work with Microsoft to make licensing costs better. That's because the physical servers have processors with all these cores, and Microsoft now licenses Windows virtual server desktops based on the number of cores and the serving servers. So, if you got to build 10 or 20 servers on that desktop, you got to license them all with Microsoft. They should have a partnership with Microsoft to decrease the virtual licensing of servers in partnerships so that when you purchase the servers, you also get licensing for Microsoft on top of them. That's because it gets very expensive to license virtual operating systems to run on physical servers.

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.

HPE ProLiant DL Servers lack scalability.

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.

It has something called WorldView. They should do some enhancement over WorldView to run an operating system as a code. Such a feature would be amazing for running multiple servers. They are already working on this, and they can enhance the existing versions for this. It should also be cheaper. It is currently expensive.

They should continue to maintain the stability that is there.

They are pretty solid servers, but, just like all servers, they become obsolete after some time. They can maybe provide a console to monitor the health of the servers. There should be some kind of console to which you can log in to remotely check on the health of a server, even when the server is off. The servers that we have are only scalable to some extent. They have got a limited amount of hard drive that you can insert. Their scalability should be improved.

We found that the extensions could be improved and the price could be a little lower.

I honestly can't think of any areas for improvement.

The technical support could be a little faster.

It is too expensive. Its price should be improved. The system admin interface should have better visibility while troubleshooting a problem, even when the problem is coming from the application.

The solution is pretty complete, for what I have seen over the past three years. I can't recall if I've felt that any features were lacking within that time. The technical support is pretty good, however, they could be a bit faster and more responsive.

In DL 500 systems, the flow of air is not good enough, and some components get overheated. IBM systems have better airflow and scalability. We have a data center that has limited physical space. Therefore, we need to maximize the processing or compute systems that we use. In HP servers, such as DL 500, there are only four processors, whereas IBM servers, such as SR 916, have eight processors. We don't get any support from HP because of our geographical location. We solve all problems ourselves by doing research on the internet. It would be good to get HP support.

Configurations very simplified. The technical support and training process Very good.

Sometimes, there are connectivity issues and the server is not able to connect to our SAN. One example is when we reboot from SAN storage, we face issues such as not being able to detect the SAN port. After we installed two new physical hard disks, that issue went away. It should be more stable.

The price of this solution should be lowered to make it more competitive.

They can increase the controller cache. Currently, it has a controller cache of up to 4 GB. The RAID controller card comes with a maximum of 4 GB cache in HPE servers, whereas it comes with a maximum of 8 GB cache in Dell servers. They can also improve the port size. HP provides a 25 GB port on the server, whereas both Dell and Cisco provide a 100 GB port.

I would like to see more of a hard drive base. IT keeps on changing the versions of their products. There have historically been great differences in time than when the G server, the Gen8, nine, and now 10 generations of DL ProLiant server have been available, the time differences are much less. Specifically for G9, G10 even less than one year, now there is no way people like us will keep on upgrading servers without having proper ROI. HPE needs to allow us to replace the CTUs of a higher generation.

If they could put more disk array in one node or rebuild it in the same server, it would be very helpful and more powerful.

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.