What needs improvement with HPE SimpliVity?

There are some problems with support from HPE. Tickets often go to Tunisian engineers who do not attend promptly. Updates are required when we have an update on vCenter or host level, and we must procure support from HPE SimpliVity team, which is complicated. Some IPs are not reachable due to subnet issues. Installation by the HPE support team can be messy.

From an improvement perspective, the setup phase needs to be made easier. The deployment process must be made easy because currently it is complex and based on Java platform. It gives out many Java errors, and the errors are not understandable, so it is very difficult to find the error point. The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required. My company experienced a situation where the product was not responsive, and afterward, we learned that three days prior, one of the disks broke, due to which the system became unresponsive.

The main issue with HPE SimpliVity is that you are very attached to VMware or VMware dependencies because the tool works with VMware technology. HPE SimpliVity is an add-on from VMware. Nowadays, my company has a lot of concerns about VMware's licensing policy. Another big concern of the tool is related to security because one has to continuously update patch vulnerabilities that are appearing continuously in VMware's different versions. Actually, the foundation of all the architecture is VMware and that is one of the main issues with the tool. My company is analyzing our virtual infrastructure strategy to see if we can move to Nutanix because maybe it may work better and might have another approach. Nutanix is absolutely independent of VMware. I could add that since HPE SimpliVity is very precisely dependent on VMware, it is not open to containers unlike Nutanix, for example. The aforementioned area is a concern that needs to be resolved by HPE.

In terms of improvement, integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges. It might be a combination of experience gaps and communication issues. For improvement, there is the need for better integration support and consideration of cost implications, particularly for smaller setups with budget constraints looking to leverage HCI advantages.

One thing that I would like to see improved is the flexibility of the node expansion. Currently, you have to match the same storage capacity and performance when you expand a node. This can be a challenge if you need to add more storage or performance to an existing cluster.

If I want to upgrade any hardware components or make any changes to the hardware configuration, there are a lot of parameters I need to consider with respect to HP security. If I want to upgrade, I sometimes have to replace the box or add a new server to the environment or setup. It's a limitation of HP connectivity.

I don't have any criticisms of SimpliVity at the moment, but I would like to see how it stacks up to vSAN and Data Core. It's essential for the client to have the comparison and be secure that they made a good choice.

The price can be dropped a little bit. The product should be competitive with other brands. The technical support around the world can be a lot more open as you cannot search all the KBs or the community for support. Most of the time, you need to call HPE directly. The solution really just lacks documentation.

It's not exactly straightforward to use. We need to train our people as some features that are there we are not used to or maybe we don't know how to use. Therefore, we need to train our people. Maybe the price could be a bit better. The compatibility with other products needs an improvement. There's a controller or something that is used. Instead of using vSAN, they use another technology, NFS. I don't like it. That said, it works.

Its scalability can be improved. When we put a lot of nodes, sometimes, its performance decreases. Its price can also be improved. I would like some reporting about backup and replication.

The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time. Its scalability can also be improved.

HPE SimpliVity could be more flexible and scalable. I don't feel SimpliVity is flexible or easily scalable because I still need to buy another server to add to my clusters. I can't just run or harvest and add to my solution. I need to buy another server. There are a lot of components that are not giving a lot of value to me right now. I also had a few problems with the built-in hard disk drives. I've had many issues with the harvest stripes that the servers use. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's unusual to have a physical failure on the HPE platform. I don't see any value at the software level, especially in the software that manages that solution. I was waiting for something, especially in the application layer that I would use, but that is all over VMware, and it doesn't have an integrated module that I can use to manage the server and all the instances.

I would like more extensive deployment orchestration where the vCenter is deployed initially without being a separate thing. I feel that the deployment process of the vCenter should be included in the initial deployment to make it easier. Also, there are some issues when it comes to VMware's attaching and upgrades because HPE doesn't support all versions of VMware, and it can take some time before they have tested the latest versions. So the lifecycle management can be improved, and also the initial deployment to include vCenter.

An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration.

There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all. Every now and then, we would have an instance where the replication of a backup wouldn't complete in a timely manner, and that would get it all wigged out in terms of how it maintained the files in the background, the way it knows whether a file has changed or not, and whether it is backed up and replicated. We would basically just suspend that backup for a little bit, do a manual backup of that server, and completely replicate it to other sites. We would then turn the regular backup routine back on, and then it would be fine. So, that's all dependent on the bandwidth.

I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party.

Technologies are going ahead with new patches and updates, and HPE has to find out a solution to make it more reliable and secure. Its deployment should be easier.

Once I am into the SimpliVity environment, I always have to go with HP because I am somewhat blocked, like Apple. Secondly, if I want to increase only storage, I need to buy an entire computing node for that, an entire HCI node. However, there are certain other providers, like Hitachi and AirDeck, that provide solutions. You can go with any of the hardware infrastructure, and they can provide you with their solutions for HCI itself. HCI is a simple software layer, a hypervisor layer for them. So, they can add computing, storage, and networking to it that is vendor agnostic. In HP, Dell, VxRail, or Cisco, there is a drawback. I have to go with that brand again, and I have to add a simple load of HCI in place if I want to increase computing, networking, or storage. SimpliVity is also compatible with all HP appliances, though it is not compatible with other brands or vendors. It could be more compatible and more secure.

It would be better if it could integrate more easily with other vendors.

The solution has a complex configuration. So I think they should simplify the con. They should go back to having special hardware for the compression with T2, so you don't need to have a big processor if you use just one processor.

Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market.

The product is expensive. We are in Turkey and the Turkish Lira currency is higher than in other countries. $1 is about 9 Turkish Lira now. If you buy something in US dollars, and if you calculate it in our currency, that means we need to multiply the total by nine. It's costly. The initial configuration is complicated. HPE had to help us. HPE is complex. HPE SimpliVity uses some additional memory inside in order to do site infrastructure work. However, you need to calculate this. You need to make sure you have enough memory and CPU for your purposes now and in the future. However, they don't explain that you might lose, for example, 10% of memory during configuration. Knowing that might affect what you actually need in the long run. They really have to lay out for their customers at the outset what is used and how much space is taken up, et cetera. That way, you can calculate that into your capacity.

I think the licensing cost could be lower.

I'd like to see some improvements in terms of simplifying deployment and making it more user friendly. I think the technical support could be improved as well.

There's nothing overly special or unique about the solution. Overall, SimpliVity has a lot of features, however, those features need to be more precise. It's like a jack of all trades and master of none. It needs to hone in on a few features and really make them shine. SimpliVity claims to have what you call a compression and dedup ratio, however, in practice, it doesn't really work. They need to give more controls and more features as far as the backup is concerned. The initial setup is not that easy. The licensing could be more clear. The technical support isn't ideal right now.

There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from.

The solution needs to improve the high data availability. The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow. There needs to be more customization capabilities available for customers. That's lacking and clients would really like it if they could better customize the product to better fit their needs.

In terms of what should be improved, I think that the local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HPE doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here. Additionally, the price must be better. Here in Argentina, Dell is very competitive. If the client doesn't understand the functionality that SimpliVity has, he will chose by price, and Dell is very, very competitive here in Argentina. Lastly, Stretched Cluster is a new functionality and is something that the client needs.

It would be good to have more compatibility with other solutions as an improvement in the future. As a suggestion, in order to have compatibility with other solutions, there could be a license fee for this, and if you don't need to them then you do not need to pay.

We haven't really explored all areas of this solution we are still in the POC phase. Pricing and monitoring could be improved. I think that they should have their own hyper-converged system.

We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup.

I would like to see support for having different clustered environments for production and testing. When it comes to performing backups, the dashboard is not intuitive and not user-friendly. This is something that should be improved. It should be easier to perform backups.

The price is one of the biggest problems our customers have. The solution is great, but at the end of the day, it's expensive. Compared to other solutions on the market, like Nutanix or vSAN, you are paying for something else. In this case, I have to explain the big differences within HPE SimpliVity. Overall, the biggest issue I have is regarding the price. The problem is not necessarily with the HPE SimpliVity console itself because it's very easy to integrate with. Sometimes, our customers just want to have the opportunity to have the freedom to choose between Hyper-V and VMware. We love that kind of possibility. It's not so frequently that we have a request about Hyper-V, but our customers do ask about the differences regarding licensing prices because at the end of the day, with Microsoft, the hypervisor is included with the operating system — that saves money. The feature that I would like to see improved in the next release is migrations. There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster.

Prior to the latest release, it was a real pain to upgrade SimpliVity. First, the host server had to be upgraded with the latest drivers, followed by an upgrade of the OmniStack controller software, and lastly, an upgrade of the VMware ESXi software. Each of the three steps were done independently and the process took 2 to 3 hours per node. Starting with the 4.0 Release, an Upgrade Manager orchestrates the whole process and greatly simplifies it. It still takes 2+ hours per node, however.

There is room for improvement in the operations area because the support for that server space is minimal. I want to sell a solution, but not bigger than the one I have. Maybe they can offer more features for more customers and optimize it, but with the same protections that I already have right now. I want to replicate my business offering in the United States. I want to pay for HPE SimpliVity in Mexico, but they told me that it's not possible. They told me that I need to look for a representative in the United States and make all the payments over there.

It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity.

To install or to update it is more complicated than other solutions. They can automate a lot of things. We do a lot of things manually and this is somewhat unnecessary. For example, the installation of a plug-in, or VMware, and so on. If you can automate all these things, like Nutanix, you get a better result. It's very simple to install Nutanix. You click and wait. The whole implementation is pretty automatic. SimpliVity will be very, very good if it can automate many aspects of the deployment. It would be ideal if they could include OpenView managers in one place with all the equipment.

Its performance can be faster.

The price is quite high and the system could also be more scalable. It would be great if SimpliVity could offer more hardware options. At the moment we have only a small choice of the systems you can buy. I think it would be better to sell it or buy it if they are more options.

HPE SimpliVity needs improvement. I know there were some difficulties on the Hyper-V side. They worked very well on the VMware but unfortunately, Hyper-V is not well-developed. You have some bugs on it. On the small nodes, there's no problem, but on the medium and the big nodes they have some improvement to do on the Hyper-V. Because Hyper-V is not very stable on SimpliVity, we would like a way that they can make an improvement on this, because many of our customers are only on Microsoft and would not like to move on VMware. It would be very nice if we can have a very stable solution for Hyper-V, on the hyper-converged side, so that when you have customers on VMware or Hyper-V we can provide a solution that is stable.

I don't think it's as simple as it is marketed, but it is a new product. Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there. The product needs more maturity because of the industry.

My main problem with the solution is that it is taking too much memory for something that we don't build. We are not creating the VM; it is created by the deployment. It is the SimpliVity solution which is using the memory that I was counting on for my production part. This is the biggest problem that I have. I know that the VM has to built there, but I would hope that they have a different area in the system to use this different type of memory. The production memory should stay with the customer when the machine is built, and during deployment, it should use different memory.

When we make some upgrades to the platform, it does take time to stabilize the structure again. We would like a simple interface to use.

I would like them to add more connection capability, a hub and spoke model, to improve the number of connections that it can handle. That would be helpful because we have a lot of retail stores. There are certain technical things that we run into. There's a matrix compatibility where, if you upgrade one piece, the rest have to fall into line. If that requirement could be eased up a bit it would be a good thing.

HPE could give us more options for server models to chose when using the product. Right now, we can only use the DL380.

I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install.

There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site.

SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one. It's sort of silly. I feel like it would be like half a day of programming for somebody to write something that would just auto-balance it. The vCenter integration could probably improve a little. It is just a plugin that you are interacting with, and it feels like it has been largely the same for a while. It could probably get better.

It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline. If it's not already included, an additional feature I would like to see would be better Storage vMotion. That would be number one on my wish list.

There are a lot of features that they need to improve on, such as the backup and DR feature sets. I would also like to see it able to restore item levels, especially for databases. They don't have that right now.

The biggest feature, which should be included, is some method to handle archival backup or cloud-based backup. Where SimpliVIty typically falls down with their data structure is: The longer a backup is kept, the more space it ends up inevitably using. When you get into things that you have to keep for five or seven years for legal requirements or regulatory compliance, then you start taking up a lot of space with these old dead backups that you are probably never going to use again. Being able to offload those to a separate platform or cloud storage location would be ideal.

We would like to have more security with the solution.

I would like to see an option to add external storage that can be seen by all of the nodes in a stack. For example, if I need to build a file share, or something, where there is not enough data than needs to be accessed quickly, but there is a lot of data, putting a large file share or user file share on SimpliVity currently doesn't makes sense. We had failures out-of-the-box of our new technology along with a few bugs during the initial setup. Our initial five nodes had three power failures during setup. The OmniStack module needs improvement, because from what I have read, the newer versions use even more memory. So, as we upgrade, we lose resources available for systems.

The upgrade path needs to be better defined on the spec sheets. I would like hard numbers to be revealed to me, instead of being hidden by, "We have to go to HPE to get you a special request, then fill a part number for me."

The ease of new deployments could be improved. Also, I think that the scalability of the solution may be inadequate for some people. It would be good for this platform if we could have an independent gross-storage on the computer.

The upgrades need improvement.

It would be nice if the storage could be expanded by simply adding additional SSD drives. There are unused drive slots but I believe you have to add more nodes if additional storage is required in the future. SimpliVity updates are a painful and complex process that takes about two hours per node. First, the drivers on each node need to be updated which, although it's a reasonably straightforward process, takes roughly an hour per node. Next, the OmniStack software needs to be updated and this is a complex, Linux command-line process that also takes about an hour per node. Fortunately, as part of HPE product support, they offer remote update assistance but I hope HPE will simplify the update process in the near future.

* Backup from D2D only to "D2D to tape" * Supports hybrid HDD storage (lower cost for the second-tier workload, now all SSD storage only) * Support

Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes.

We should have something called micro segmentation inside the SimpliVity box, which can be easily implemented. They are using backup from snapshots. Maybe they can integrate with VM or similar mechanics.

Bandwidth throttling during offsite backups. When we implemented this solution for the first time to replace another system we brought down the WAN line until the initial data set was replicated. They do have an off-peak time setting but throttling would be better for a 24/7 shop.

The customer has 100 virtual machines. We need to offer high availability for their production environment.

I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes. In order to balance this data out, a support call is required and the support technician will spend some time rebalancing the nodes. The access to do this by end users is not given. It is also somewhat difficult to monitor the actual node's physical storage with out-of-the box monitoring tools due to the virtualization of this layer.