HPE BladeSystem Reviews

Among the most important features, is the possibility to manage all the systems from a single web UI, the ease of working with networks through the Virtual Connect devices, and finally the huge information offered in relation to the monitoring of the different elements and alarm systems

The scalability of these solutions and its great adaptation to existing software models has allowed our cloud environment to grow easily. The physical volumes with data combined with its performance, has enabled us to reduce our pool of conventional equipment, and converge High Availability solutions in our cloud environment with powerful hardware.

We expected more processing power, with more CPU cores and a greater number of cores per CPU.

Our company currently uses hardware solutions from different manufacturers. In relation to the HP Proliant products used for our cloud environment, these are primarily equipment BL and ML generations G4, G5, G6, G7 and G8. Our cloud environments also feature HP 3PAR storage solutions. The HP Proliant solutions have been used in our cloud environment for over five years. It was the best option available on the market, and we believe that it now enjoys the best reputation for such solutions.

The only problems encountered in the implementation of these products is that there are always more updated versions of the firmware supplied with the products, which requires revision and updating equipment before putting into production. Some versions of HP Blade require additional drivers for installation or special software distributions designed for these products.

Our satisfaction with the Customer Service is high, both the attention and availability as the solutions offered have always met our expectations.

The service availability of technical support gives us great peace of mind because their response times are minimal.

We actually had different solutions, and still do. Solutions such as Cisco UCS, which has a very similar philosophy, beaome more complex and less effective. Solutions from manufacturers such as Supermicro, and Dell do not reach the expectations, and require more supervision and maintenance by our technicians.

The installation was easy. It's usually quite intuitive since their operations team, and our team both have extensive experience in this type of facility, so that did not involve a special effort.

I can not evaluate the return on investment, as I don't work in accounts, but I understand that if we continue to invest in these solutions, we will get good economic results.

Their reliability and their integration. I’ve been working with HP solutions since the 90s, and they’re great.

They do what they’re supposed to do. They’re very flexible.

In the future, I'd like to see more manageability. They keep adding features which are nice, so I can’t think of anything else.

Relatively stable and reliable for the amount that we have. I’ve been working with HP hardware for decades, and as with all hardware there’s always problems, but for the years that I’ve been working with them they’re always been very reliable.

We haven’t really had to scale, but we can provision them usually from the get-go for what we do.

It’s okay. Working in support myself, their response times for us (we have a couple thousand servers) didn’t seem to be great. A lot of the time, there’s no concessions for response times not being met.

They’ve had servers forever, and we’ve always had HP. So we just continued using the existing solution.

They’re pretty straightforward. It’s all automated so that their tools are deployed for us.

We’ve been with HP forever, so I don’t think so.

I’m pretty opinionated, but first look at pricing and see which option is right for you. HP is a good bet, but it really depends. I can only speak about HP, but they’ve been very good.

iLO (Remote Management) is probably the best in the market, their RAID Cards (SmartArray) are also very good.

1. iLO even in its basic form can get you out of hot water as you can just do a remote power-cycle. iLO Advance can get you to remotely troubleshoot the OS even if its in a defunct state
2. RAID I have found useful as its quite easy to remotely expand the array
3. Upgrading of firmware is very easy as well, even in a VMWare vSphere (ESXi hypervisor)

I believe they are ahead of the other vendors (IBM, Dell and Cisco). Probably what they can improve on are minor things -

1. Registration of licenses, this includes iLO advanced and upgraded support. This requires you to log on with HP and activate the key that has been given to the server. Its just a convoluted process that I rather as a technical engineer not have to do.
2. Access to updated drivers and firmware. They now require you to logon and have the device serial number to get to drivers. Even new devices requires this. If the device is 3 years old OK, but new devices just frustrates the customer and slows down deployments.

Full time the last five years but I have been around them for eight years.

Generally no. We did have issues where a RAID card would not work with array build until we updated the firmware. Even after getting HP to replace the RAID card, the replacement card came with the same faulty firmware. This was for a bottom end server though. All the mid and high range servers have had no problems with deployments.

If there is ever a problem with stability, generally firmware has fixed this, We've had a range of issues, probably the most common issue has been SAS cards and tape drives staying up (both in Windows and ESXi environments). We did have an issue where during a power outage, the BIOS lost the boot sequence on a sever that was using an SD Card as its boot device, a firmware update fixed that. Teamed NICS having dropouts also required updates.

No, these servers when specified can host incredible amounts of VM's. The CPU options and RAM expansions are very good.

Excellent, they are happy to trust you in raising the issue and supply you with replacement hardware with minimal fuss. They are also helpful if you require technical assistance for configuration.

We used to use IBM. I wasn't part of the decision for the change but to be honest I'm glad we moved away from IBM. They had moved to LSI for RAID and their UEFI Bios meant every reboot took 10 minutes. Also their technical support was rapidly going downhill.

Straightforward, 90% of all installation you can just refer to the server cover for RAM sequence, CPU installations or RAID expansion.

We are a reseller.

Its hard to say but if you count the improvement of remote access (iLO) and ease of upgrading firmware means we don't have to organise serious downtimes when we had previously dealt with other vendors.

We previously used IBM Servers and we may revisit this if Lenovo fixes the issues with the IBM servers. We also haved used Cisco UCS servers where the deal suited. I still believe HP is still ahead of both Cisco and IBM.

We are using it for our hypervisor. Within our organization, there are roughly 2,000 users, using this solution. 

Software-defined hardware might sound counter-intuitive, but it is the way of the future.

HPE BladeSystem is easy to use. It conserves a lot of space.

The management side of this solution could be improved. In our case, it's managed via OneView — it's an appliance. It could be better, its interface doesn't feel 100% intuitive. 

In addition, HPE tech support is very poor.

I have been using HPE BladeSystem for three years.

HPE BladeSystem is both stable and scalable.

A contractor implemented this solution for us.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to others. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give HPE BladeSystem a rating of eight.

As a company, as a service provider, we primarily use the solution in order to give service to other companies.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's an easy process. 

Technical support is pretty good.

The solution is quite mature.

The stability, in general, is good.

I have noticed that the solution does provide a very good ROI for companies.

I've dealt with the product for about 20 years at this point. It's likely been two decades. I've spent a lot of time with it overall.

The performance is okay, 

The scalability is okay.

Technical support is good. They are going a good job overall. I would describe them as helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support that is on offer.

I have not found the initial setup to be overly difficult or complex. It's straightforward. The process is simple. 

The solution is one of the best in terms of providing an excellent ROI to its users.

We are HPE partners.

We mostly deal with eh latest version of the solution. I can't speak to the exact version number. 

I'd recommend the solution. It's a good choice for the right use case. A company needs to look at it and decide if it's right for them and their purposes, however.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of ten overall. We've been mostly happy with its capabilities.

Here are the valuable hardware and software features:

Hardware:

• Multi-generational blade system which supports all the way from Gen1 to Gen9 without a forklift upgrade or keeping old enclosures around.
• Up to 16 servers of varying physical sizes (half and full height) allowed in a single enclosure.
• Multiple scalable backplane options (including 16Gb Brocade fiber switches and 10Gbe Cisco Fabric Extenders) to ensure optimal redundancy and interoperability with other datacenter hardware.
• Allows the use of network defined architectures without the need for additional training.
• Allows storage admins, server admins, and network admins access to each component without additional cost or delay due to lack of familiarity.
• Multiple power options: Single and three phase power for different datacenter layouts.
• Versatile with optional virtual connect module to enhance east/west traffic flow for virtualization, reducing unnecessary north and south traffic.

Software:

• Onboard Administrator
• Insight Control
• HPE OneView

This solution has improved our organization as follows:

• Ease of management and configuration through a single pane of glass for up to 16 blade servers.
• Leveraging the Onboard Administrator for control over troubled servers without the need for physical access to the servers.
• Ability to reset blade server fuses remotely if they become completely unresponsive. Removes the need for many calls to a datacenter for support.
• OneView has taken this a step further with newer generation blades. This cannot be leveraged on the blades older than Gen7.

The Onboard Administrator (OA) is the heart of C7000 enclosure management, it integrates advanced health and monitoring to the point of even iLo launching through the OA to KVM a blade server that is not responsive. There are two OA modules, one active, the other passive.

HPE contacted us after identifying the serial number of our active OA module was in a critical recall list.

While all components are redundant including two Cisco Fabric Extenders (Fex) for Network Connectivity of the blade servers (Our config is 4 x 10 Gbe per Fabric Extender teamed with the second Fabric Extender through Virtual Port Channel). A single OA replacement caused 15 servers with VPC protection to be dropped off the network when the device was failed from active to passive; completely disrupting 200+ VMs and >2000 users; all when it was assured to failover gracefully.

If I was to physically disconnect all cables in one Fex, or even remove it from a blade enclosure it would operate fine, but for some reason, the bad OA module caused a network reset to occur which eliminated all redundancy on the link.

For more information on VPC to elaborate it’s power, flexibility and resilience, please see the following links: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/p...
http://www.netcraftsmen.com/ho...

We have been using this solution for nine years, through different revisions.

We only had a stability issue with a defective OA Module. Other than that, most blade servers have only seen odd failures on hard drives or RAID batteries on older generations.

The super capacitor in newer generations seems even more resilient. No critical outages have occurred at a blade enclosure level in over nine years of use with c7000 generations, other than a single defective OA module.

There was a legendary update on the chassis itself, in a mission critical ERP/Citrix environment.

We have never reached a threshold on scalability with the c7000. With multiple I/O interconnects on the backplane, we have never maxed out its capabilities.

I recommend having Proactive Care Advanced Support or Datacenter Care on any critical datacenter infrastructure. When leveraging this level of support, we have had great results hitting the advanced resolution center.

The Proactive Care and above coverage also grants you a TAM and quarterly health checks including intimate knowledge of your environment, interoperability of your firmware versions, and recommendations to avoid potential conflicts.

The tool was up in two hours, fully migrating blades from old to new c7000 included to this timing. Fiber zoning and ethernet configuration is a breeze. As long as you know your products from the last generation, it’s quite intuitive.

Always ensure that you purchase the Insight Control Suite. This will ensure all current and future blades are licensed for iLO and other features. This will ensure ease of use and configuration.

We evaluated IBM BladeCenter and HPE BladeCenter M1000 Series.

It is quite easy to setup, configure, and get fully into production. This is the case even when physically migrating old blades from an old c7000 to a newer c7000 chassis. That can happen in less than two hours.

When placed on the same fiber fabric and properly utilizing aliases, these are completely hot swappable between chassis. This is super-efficient and smooth on the transitions and decommissioning of the older chassis.

Be warned: Even though G1 servers are supported, having a 2Gb fiber card in the old G1 servers will cause them to be non-functional with new 16Gb fiber switches. This is not an HP issue, but rather a limitation of legacy fiber. Plan appropriately when upgrading older technology!

The HPE BladeSystem is a very stable system. We use them in our data centres for the design and development our systems. We're talking about hundreds of BladeSystems we have in place.

It is very convenient that we can assemble them like building blocks. We can just buy them and put them in the system. They are standard building blocks.

We would like to see faster processing and more memory.

BladeSystems are very stable.

Scalability is perfect.

We use technical support every now and then when we have some hardware problems and I think it's fine. Depending if it's a reseller or HPE itself. I would say in general it's okay.

We have been using BladeSystems for almost six years now. We didn’t really have a previous solution.

There's always a learning curve when you start with a new product. When you past the learning curve, then it's straightforward.

Have a serious look at this. It brings a lot of value for us. That tells enough. Our company is doing very well.

When selecting a vendor, the pricing must be okay. But next to the pricing, I want to see a long term road map and know that they will be a trusted partner.

The HPE BladeSystem is a universal platform for server infrastructure. It is easy to manage and to connect to your other infrastructure, fiber channel network, and so on.

It's mainly focused on management and reliability. It's a fairly reliable platform, almost no outages. It works perfectly.

It could be improved in terms of management, in terms of uptime. When you do the firmware upgrades, it's not acceptable; we have downtime issues. It’s not good with that, but it's getting better and better.

We have been working with HPE BladeSystem C7000 since 2007. Until recently, the firmware updates on the connectivity modules (FC and Ethernet) and Virtual Connect could not be done without downtime. For an enterprise system, this is not acceptable. It is only since last year that we did the first online upgrades without any downtime.

It's very stable; just minor issues; no big issues.

You scale within the enclosure. You get 16 servers and then you can buy extra enclosures. It's scalable.

Technical support is OK. I'm not directly working with support myself, just indirectly. But from what I hear from the engineers, it's OK.

We previously used other HPE servers, just the old ProLiant servers and other lines. We converted to BladeSystems and these products.

Initial setup is quite complex. You have to think before you start.

We chose this solution quite a long time ago. I don’t remember what else we considered. We chose HPE because we were already an HPE customer.

Invest in preparation. The HPE BladeSystems are being succeeded by the Synergy systems, announced last year. That's the successor, so look at that.