HPE OneView Reviews

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I would like OneView to support VMware. Our infrastructure is 78% VMware.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

It is very stable.

We did not have a different solution.

We looked at VMware Operations Manager, Dell Management, System Center Configuration Manager, and others.

It provides insight for management.

I would like it to be a little more optimized for some performance enhancements.

The stability is fair.

Scalability is there. It could use a little help, but it's good. As it scales out, it's a little more cumbersome to manage.

Technical support is top notch.

We did not have a previous solution. We found out about this solution through a partner. He brought it to us and said, "Hey, you know, this might be something you want to consider." When selecting vendors, they have to be stable. HPE is pretty good.

Our installations have been straightforward.

Get a good partner.

Just the ability to provision the servers with storage and network everything within one interface, not having to go into multiple interfaces to provision those pieces.

For us with the flexibility that it has given to us, I would rate it very highly. But, again, this was a game changing move for us, to go into something where we could easily provision systems, easily move those workloads from one physical enclosure to another physical enclosure without having to audit enclosures. It gave us a secret pane of glass.

My team did not actually manage storage before. When we brought this in, everything flows into OneView, so we managed the storage, we managed the fiber fabric and the compute. Really the only thing that we don't manage at this point is the Cisco switches. Everything else my team actually manages within that OneView interface.

So, for us, just the simplicity of being able to manage everything within that single pane of glass has been just huge for us. A lot of time savings for us. Being able to take that profile, and just making a copy of it, and just deploy stuff rapidly again, as opposed to doing it one server at a time has really taken and given some of my team more time to do some of the more proactive stuff.

So, I would have to say for us, personally, at our company, it's been a ten. I think it's also made it a little simpler for us to actually deploy systems. It's also given it the ability to move workloads from one physical structure to another physical structure if they're all managed with the same OneView environment.

So, it's added some flexibility for us. We've shifted to BOOT from SAN because of it, where we're actually replicating some of that data from one data center to another and then utilizing OneView to create a profile just to bring those replicated lines back up at the second site.

Our company was actually part of a - I don't even know what they call it - but you sit down with HP, they talk to you about features that you would like to see with their next release, and then actually a few months later they brought us into the HP campus and they actually showed us some of the things they were doing with the next release of the OneView.

Some of the things that we said at that time was better ability to do firmware. So, we obviously follow a chain-management process. Within that chain-management process we have to be able to show, "Hey, here's the list of servers that need this firmware," and then also give a report afterwards saying, "Hey, here are those lists of servers and here's their firmware now, but they're up-to-date."

So those were some of the things that we were asking, it was just some improvements on reporting and then improvements on how we do the patch process, in general, for firmware and drivers and things like that. So, that's really what we were looking for, and those were things that they were showing us that there's going to be possibly capabilities in the future release.

We've been on it only for about two and a half years, but it's been a game-changer for us. I really like it. It's a really good product for us.

We've really had very few issues with it. Initially stability, as far the application being up, has been good. We ran into a couple of issues here and there with the baselines for the firmware and not having enough space on the appliance itself to be able to have more than two baselines.

We actually work with HP, they had a way for us to expand that space where we could do more baselines, and so once that happened, we were pretty good.

Scalability has been good. We've actually scaled an additional, I want to say, five or six enclosures and added it to the environment, and we've really had no issues with it whatsoever as far as just bringing it in and increasing our storage footprint, or increasing our computer footprint, or whatever it's been.

It's really been pretty seamless for us. I mean, once you get it in, it really reads all the information for you and then you've got it. So it's been good.

We have used technical support, like I was mentioning with the space issue that we've had. We've used technical support just in general, OneView included, just on some of the ways that we wanted to actually do our profiles, so we could do that replication between sites. So, we did engage with them in things like that.

So I'll be honest, in my role, I'm not really doing the face-time with that. My team has not really ever come to me with any kind of issues. We actually have an account support manager from HP who is specific for the OneView environment that we own.

So typically what they'll do is they'll open up a ticket with HP, but then they'll send that information to the ASM and he'll really get things moving if things are stagnant for us.

So, before that we just had C7000 enclosures and we were just logging into each OA and just doing profiles individually per enclosure. So, now with OneView we create the profiles, but then we have ten enclosures included into that system.

We can just move stuff where we want. We didn't have that capability before. We never linked our C7000s, so each C7000 had its own profiles and its own OA that we had to login.

The setup was pretty straightforward. So to be honest, at the end, we brought in HP services to do the implementation of OneView. Obviously, we sat there with them and got an understanding of what they were doing and what the product did and how you installed it.

It's just basically a virtual client, so it wasn't really all that difficult to set up.

We actually looked at UCS and HP. We were looking for a converged environment, but we really didn't want just a canned approach to that.We had some limitations from our networking side on what gear they would allow us to use. We're a Cisco shop for networking. And, so most of the HP converge systems come with their own network and everything. We couldn't use the network.

So, we really worked with HP and they worked with us, and we actually came up with a custom converged environment where we used Cisco for the networking. But then, it's a great powerful storage and everything else is what they had.

We built a new data center. We needed something that was going to be a little more progressive than just racking a server, racking a server, building an application. We needed the capability to do site-to-site replication on not just virtual machines, but physical hardware. That's why we looked at the two systems.

To be honest with you, OneView was the deciding factor on going with HP, opposed to the other vendor, because with the other vendor, like I was saying, you had to go to the origin. This is mine. And we want something that we can just do everything in one pane and be done.

First and foremost when selecting a product, its got to fit within our environment. So, it can't be something that's kind of left out there that's just way off of what we do with standards and things like that.

We've been an HP shop for a long time. We've been in an enclosure shop for a long time. So, familiarity was another piece. Trying to teach your team, or have your team try to learn new equipment or new technologies that are not in line with what they're already doing can be a very large undertaking. I think familiarity and just a fit within our environment are a couple of the keys that we really look at.

So, I'm an X86 person. We also have an AIX environment, as well,along with Linux. They are obviously on power, so IBM for the AIX stuff. On X86, we're all HP hardware.

Obviously, we use Cisco, we use Brocade, Citrix, Microsoft. Those are our short list of vendors that we deal with a lot.

I would just say, "Make sure you do your diligence. Make sure you look at every aspect of what you're going to be bringing in. Make sure that none of those pieces are going to be in any kind of conflict, or harder for you to manage or take care of.

Go with the one that fits your company that you can manage. There is less of a market curve for your company. At the end of the day, that's time spent on non-work, or non-proactive, or any of that stuff.

You're spending time trying to learn a new environment, or a new system when you still need to be doing work that you're doing.

So, I would just say, make sure you vet out the whole environment and not just one piece of it.

The automation capabilities are the most valuable. I don't have to use CD-ROMs or anything like that to provision the servers. Plug in a server and give it a profile. The whole thing is automated.

It saves us a lot of time. Time is money. We mess around with servers all day. So, it's a huge time saver. It also helps us track our inventory better in terms of where things are. With one of these you can actually plan out your whole data center. Build out where the server physically is, and historically we've had trouble with that sometimes. People would ask, "Oh, where is server XYZ?" We had to look it up on a spreadsheet or some data base. Sometimes that's not always accurate. We were sort of roaming around the data center trying to find the server. So, this is just pretty cool.

I would like to see support for things that aren't in the current generation. We have a lot of 7th and 8th generation hardware.

In the 9th generation, we are looking at virtual connect. Virtual connect profiles, things like that. So, we have a bunch of old hardware that's not in virtual connect, there's no virtual connect profiles, and you can't really do anything with that stuff. You can see it but that's about it. It would be nice if they supported some of the older generation hardware.

Stability is pretty solid. I couldn't say I've really had any problems with it, aside from the upgrade to 3.0. There was a pretty nasty bug with the first release that they fixed within a week, fortunately. But that caught us and caused some problems. But, aside from that, it's been pretty stable.

We just installed one last year (2016), so we couldn't say we have a million servers in there. But I haven't had any performance issues with the amount of servers we have in it. And it seems to scale okay.

Technical support is pretty good. We haven't had many problems with it. The one time I did call support was for a known issue. There was a bug fix and they just pointed me to it.

I want to use the management platform for the entire infrastructure. I don't think you could really do anything without one unless you're into manual labor and you have a team of cheap people to do the work. But that doesn't really scale well. Automation is really where it's at.

OneView is an absolute requirement. Synergy has the appliance built into the box now. It's a critical component, so there's no getting around it. You need OneView.

We used HPE Systems Insight Manager previously, but nothing that could provision the way OneView works. There was Virtual Connect before OneView if you wanted to manage each individually as its own domain and get profiles that way. But, again, that doesn't scale. You can't have hundreds of closures and manage each one individually. You need something that can do it all in one place.

The number one question when looking for a vendor is, “does it meet the requirements?" If you go beyond meeting your requirements, then it's about service. It's about price. Issues like that.

I was involved in the setup. It was pretty straightforward. It's just an appliance. Just three clicks and you're done.

I didn't actually look for alternatives. I've been pretty happy with HPE and their solutions for a long time. But our prior leadership was looking at Cisco UCS, Dell, and Nutanix.

We have been an HPE shop for a very long time and we've been very satisfied with their solutions. So we didn't really have a problem we needed solving with HPE. Prior leadership wanted to look at other vendors, just for the sake of competition. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket. But, if you have the best upgrade solution, why would you look at an alternative?

If you're talking about a similar solution like a UCS, like Cisco, I would highly advise against Cisco UCS. Go HPE. Go OneView, for sure. The interface is a lot cleaner. It’s much better. I have colleagues that support both HPE and UCS and they would love to get rid of all their UCS and just go HPE. HPE is pretty much best upgrade.

Proactive reporting of the hardware status is the most valuable feature.

It gives us real time monitoring of up/down status and preventative actions of future hardware failure. Proactive prevention of hardware failure helps us. We use it in a firmware upgrade element manager.

I would like to see a change in the GUI, so that you can navigate easier. You can dive down into each individual product without having to do a global search.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable.

I have used technical support. They did a good job. They helped us in the implementation.

We haven’t used anything else. We are an HPE shop, so we use their element manager.

I performed the whole installation. It was straightforward. You install and then you add your devices. It does the job as advertised.

Absolutely install it. Don't get too far behind with more HPE storage or servers without this product. It does a very good job.

The single pane-of-glass and unified API allows you to handle everything from one single interface. The best thing about OneView is that you can manage rack mount servers, blades, and blade chassis, all from one single pane of glass.

It's helped in terms of monitoring, deployments, and being able to know what we have out there. We can actually integrate some of those features to manage things from afar, even from outside the data centers, as long as we have our onboard administrators configured correctly.

It works really well for basic day-to-day administrator functions without having to go into every single iLO, or every single detail for configuration.

It's really neat to be able to just slide in a new blade server, throw a blade profile on it through OneView, and that is all of the configuration that you need.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head for the next release. I think some of the stuff that's coming with Synergy is already going to be included there, like a lot of the OS integrations.

You can do some of that with Image Streamer and a Synergy chassis. A lot of those things go through OneView, which acts as its own Synergy composer, that takes you to the Image Streamer appliance. Those are their own OneView instances, so to speak.

The coming features I heard about at a recent conference are probably what I would have suggested anyway.

It's been stable so far. Once we got it up and running, we haven't had really any problems with it. We have a single-sign-on implementation for it. Once we got it hooked into our active directory, it has been very stable.

We actually have four, separate, isolated OneView instances with one master OneView on top of it. It's scaled very well so far, even from our initial smaller implementation. We have since scaled that, have experienced the scale, and it has worked really well.

I have not used technical support. I believe one of my cohorts has.

We knew that we needed to go to OneView when we started investing in the BladeSystem infrastructure. That's the best way to go when you're doing anything BladeSystem related.

I was not involved in the setup. My cohort was.

We did not look at other vendors.

When looking at vendors, I look at ease-of-use. Cost is always an important factor, as well as how it integrates with our environment and meets our regulatory requirements.

It is definitely worth it. You can have a single, unified instance to manage everything. It's great from a system admin's perspective. It's worth it.

OneView is a single pane of glass. It's getting everything managed and structured for us. We still use HPE SAN and IRS and all of those things. But now, OneView is kind of bringing that all together. We get templates, so it's speed to delivery for us. It's a big difference with the template features.

The improvement has been speed. It takes away some of the time we spend working on redundant tasks that you have to do all across the environment that you can do in OneView and then you can push it out across the whole OneView environment. It allows our engineers to work on things of higher value than just setting up the environment.

One of the big things is getting rid of a lot of the legacy devices. As we move to OneView, we want to get away from IRS and SIM and have one thing that will manage all of our accounts.

We've had a few issues. We just upgraded to the 3.9.0 version. We think that now that we are on that version, hopefully a lot of those things are going to go away for us.

Scalability has been good. We're looking to basically put our whole data center on it.

Technical support has been good. We've had some issues that have been escalated beyond support as well. All our issues have been handled. We've had some profile issues and some weird bugs. We had some features that we wish were there, that weren't really there. We've kind of set up a feature list of things like that. We have some standard, quarterly calls set up to go over these things, and they get addressed.

We needed to invest in a new solution, so it came out and it was the next step for us. It was far better than what we had. It would improve a lot of the issues that were lacking in the older model of Virtual Connect Manager.

We used Virtual Connect Manager before OneView. We evaluated Cisco UCS before that. There were some things we liked about that. We've been an HPE shop for eight or more years. It was a very easy transition to move over to that, rather than having to rip and replace all our hardware and all of those things.

When selecting a vendor, a lot of it is finding out if they are going to solve a problem for us. That's our biggest thing. So typically, if we're looking for a vendor, we're looking for a solution that's going to solve a specific problem for us. Then you need to find out about the reputation of the company. Is it a start-up? Is it someone that's been around for a while? Do we have an existing relationship with them?

We usually look to work with our existing vendors or partners before we go outside of that, unless they can't meet our needs.

OneView looked to solve that. We looked at Cisco UCS and we looked at HPE's OneView. We didn't really look at anything else outside of that.

We chose HPE, and the biggest reason was that it was a very easy transition. We did the evaluation over a year ago. The engineering team determined that UCS was the superior solution for us. But there were a lot of things that it offered that we did not need, nor were we ever planning to need. Do we have to rip and replace an entire infrastructure, retrain staff, new support models, and everything across the board?

When OneView came out, we determined that the gap was no longer an extreme gap, but rather, a small gap. Virtual Connect Manager didn't meet everything that we wanted when we compared it to UCS, but OneView was in the 90% range. So the gap was 10% and that 10% was stuff we weren't really planning to do anyway. It wasn't going to require retraining. It was just changing the way that we ran the solutions.

The big thing is you need to understand is that with all the bells and whistles, find out what you really need to do. For us, that means more knobs, more things you can turn, more things you can adjust, more areas where you either need to understand, or there are more areas that people on your staff can tweak and change. You may never want them changed. That can manipulate your environment. If you can lock things down more because you don't need that, then look at another solution. But if you need to have all of that flexibility, then maybe look this way.

The ease of use. It is easy to move things forward. Provides ease of a single interface to manage multiple products.

Manages multiple products from one point. There is one pane of glass, which is always good when you're dealing with a lot of architecture.

Active director integration.

Stability is very good.

Scalability is very good.

I haven't used them yet.

We knew we needed to invest in a new solution because of the lifecycle. We used to work with HPE’s Insight. When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I definitely recommend OneView. If you are an HPE shop, it's the way of the future. It's the single pane of glass. Products are looking the same. You have to move forward into that world.