HPE OneView Reviews

Provides a single-pane-of-glass and centralized administration of your environment.

Ease of management. One of the things with using HPE is that it's very distributed in the enterprise environment. When you're hiring other people that have worked in an enterprise environment, they usually have experience working with HPE equipment. Reliability has always been there. I've always counted on it as a good enterprise solution over a lot of other competitors.

I like where they're going with a lot of the integration in the iLO. I like the new security features in the iLO and I also like the ability to set your workload, like setting up for VMs, or setting up for a database. I think a lot of what I like is being able to program great automation. All that increases with technology. I know that whatever it is now, next year it is going to be faster and better.

The stability is very good. We usually run it beyond the specs. We usually find the limits and then we have to go to more solutions, which we still turn to HPE for. We are going to more SSD disks and we went to a newer 3PAR. That's where we really pushed our storage.

It's been very scalable. We started out not needing the storage and our plan was to grow and our company was doubling the volume every year. We have been able to scale to that, to the point where we actually went to another 3PAR. We can scale even more.

We use a lot of HPE tech support. It's been a mixed bag. We've had some really good people and we've had some people that we've just had to go around.

We always review other vendors, but I don't like to name names. I have used a number of solutions. I have been working in the industry since 97. I've actually worked all the way back with Compact. It is about ease of use and making sure the functionality is there, and then, less bugs.

Whenever you run into bugs, that kind of solution can really impact your environment.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability and stability. Without that, IT loses its face to the entire company and you have no credibility.

We chose HPE because of the holistic solution. A lot of people use the term "one throat to choke". They have really good servers, and we want to use their servers. They have really good blades, and we want to use their blades. We want to use their chassis for the density. The reliability is there. We are familiar with the iLO, and we are able to hire people who are familiar with their environment.

Work close with HPE get to know all the features, so you can really utilize all of the features that have been put in there for you.

• Single pane of glass
• Like a dashboard out-of-the-box
• Minimal setup
• Very easy to get going with

Places all of your different HPE products in one place, all in the circles where you can just get everything into nice, easy-to-use silos pretty easily. There's very little user training involved. I mean, out-of-the-box, it's pretty intuitive.

• More on the software development side
• Forms of HPE's REST API
• Different web services available for the product, especially connecting OneView back to HPE Passport and HPE Ticketing Solutions.

There is a lot of automated stuff in there, but we'd like to step into the middle of that and bring in our own different tools as a part of that integration. That would be nice.

We would really love to see greater integration, something I've raised with the HPE software engineers. They have been very forthcoming and very honest about what they'd like to do with the product.

Since they went to Version 3, it's been excellent. We had a couple of beta versions before that, which kind of just sitting around the office. Nobody was really using them. But then when Version 3 came out, it was so stable that it just started to take off.

We went from having maybe a couple of chassis in there, to having 50 or 60 C-Class chassis in there. As we add more equipment, the speed and the latency of the product seem to stay pretty low, which is awesome.

We have used HPE tech support. We had an HPE systems engineer come to the data center and help us install it. We had a demo on the Synergy frames that is imperative to setting up OneView. He came and set it all up for us. It was excellent, like hands-on, no question that couldn't be asked and no question that couldn't be answered. It is really good.

SIM does not really fit anymore. It was awesome for Gen 6 and previous, but when you go to Gen 7, 8, 9, and now Gen 10, there's so much new technology in there that you need a more complex silo or a more complex tool, like OneView. We are a full, 100% HPE shop, so it's just natural that we'd pick an excellent HPE software product to go with our excellent HPE hardware products.

When selecting a vendor, I look for good communication, excellent products, and friendly staff.

Get in there early and look at integrating, because Gen 7 and below is not going to be supported anymore. Anything new you buy can be used with OneView now, within a one life-cycle of your data center, or with one five-year life-cycle. Everything will be supported in there.

The automation is the big winner for people who use OneView. It allows several tasks to be rolled up into one very simple task.

It obviously saves me resource time, resource units. Not as many people are needed to do mundane tasks. That's where the automation comes in.

From our perspective, we don’t know of any needed improvements. Everything that was advertised to us has been available, was available and does work.

We find it quite stable. Most HPE solutions are stable.

Scalability is probably the biggest influence for choosing OneView. It doesn't matter if you're trying to manage 10 servers or 10,000 servers.

We have an account manager who is very good in this regard and any sort of technical support that we do need, we have engineers that are assigned to our account. They are always very, very helpful. Very efficient.

We didn’t have any previous solutions. It was just a correct step for us to take at the time. It was the next viable solution that we wanted in that space.

People on my team were involved in it and it was probably as smooth as we anticipated.

We spoke to several different vendors, including Dell and Hitachi. It came down to the whole idea of the partnership that we'd built up with HPE over the last 15 or 20 years.

I think you need to talk to as many vendors in the marketplace as you can. Listen to what they say and make an informed decision.

When looking for a vendor, we’re probably the same as everybody else. Cost is very important. I think the local relationship that we have with our HPE account manager and engineers within the island of Ireland makes a big difference.

From a single pane of glass, one product is used to:

• Manage all of our systems
• Do boots from SANs
• Build profiles
• Add the firmware and drivers

It makes things quicker because you only have to go into one application instead of into multiple applications. It makes it easier for new users that are in our group to learn it.

I would like to see them improve the firmware and BIOS settings. I would like to make those a little easier to use and make it fit across more of our environments. Besides that, I don't really think it's missing anything.

I think it is very stable. We are running version 2 or 3. Version 3 has been really good. We haven't had any issues with it. We had some issues with version 2, but that's just because it was new.

It is very scalable. We run 1400 environments and we haven't had any issues with the 500 physical environments.

Technical support is pretty good. We haven't had any issues with them and they get back to us. They don't do the common things, such as asking us to upgrade the firmware. They just actually help you out with the question or problem that you're having.

We used the older versions of HPE IC and SIM. Those required two interfaces and you also had to go through your OA. There were a lot of different steps to it. Teaching somebody new was always a little more difficult. Now you teach them with HP OneView, and they can automatically click on the server or the profile and go right down to the actual physical blades, and see what chassis it is in and where it is located.

When selecting a vendor, we like that we use HPE for everything except for storage. We've used them from large systems, to blades, to racks, and to clusters. We've used them for a lot of things. I think just the fact that they have such a broad portfolio of products was part of our decision.

With 3.1 coming out, it will have all of the features I was looking for. When that comes out in July, then I think we will have everything that we're looking for. I think they are ahead of the curve on what works.

It is a pretty good product. I like the fact that it's a single pane of glass. I don't like having the old environment, which had HP IC and SIM and all those other components. It always took a long time to get to the OA. Now you have one view of everything: your applications and your servers. You an easily pull reports, so there is definitely an advantage in using it.

I was not involved in the initial set up. The upgrade was very straightforward. I was involved in that part. It takes a little while but, no it was no big deal.

A long time ago, we put HPE in the blade environment against other vendors: Dell, Cisco, and IBM. Cisco had just brought out their new blade at the time. By far, HPE was easier to use and simple as far as adding memory. We can boot from SAN. It seemed like a very good product all around for doing everything that we wanted it to do.

I would think that any company would want to use it. It makes it easier for the user, the administrator, and makes it simpler from a reporting standpoint. You can see your entire environment.

Valuable to us is the ease of use. It is just so straightforward. It's very, very simple. The dashboard and the way to navigate is just very, very simple.

The whole control panel is all right there and anything you need to do for those servers is in one spot. From deploying a whole new operating system, adding new servers on the fly, if needed, and adding users.

There is no way currently to manage the onboard storage from the servers through the OneView application. You've got to go to the actual server and do it there. That was a little bit disappointing, I guess.

It is very stable. No problems.

Scalability is fantastic. That's why we got it.

We have not used the technical support yet.

The initial setup was absolutely straightforward. Very simple.

We evaluated all of them. We had many recommendations from many companies. We just thought that we made the best decision with HP, the Synergy and the OneView.

They give great service, and it's a great product, at a good price. Those would be the big three.

I don't know. Look at all the other vendors and do your due diligence and I think you'll find that this is a great solution.

For OneView, it's probably two things.

• Having the single pane of glass interface into the actual solutions that we're deploying and using.
• Above and beyond that, actually utilizing the OneView Global Dashboard. That's what we're utilizing to show everything.

We don't have a lot of installations, but it's there to show the customers that if they have multiple installations of OneView, they can integrate it all into a single pane of glass, so they can manage their infrastructure more effectively.

It keeps us from having to go and do things manually. So, the benefits are:

• firmware updates
• OS deployments
• managing the blade infrastructure that we have
• being able to change the blade infrastructure on the fly
• going in and changing server profiles
• updating the firmware levels

So, it makes it easier for us to do all that as well for our customers.

Honestly, I was just working with one of the Beta versions in one of the hands-on labs and I think from a management functionality, it's very complete with regards to the hardware and what the different offerings have as far as management is concerned.

Maybe it could be a little faster. Also, streamlining the code a little bit, making it a little bit more responsive. I noticed as we were doing this in a virtualized environment here in the labs, that it seems to occasionally have choke points that slow it down a little bit and then it speeds back up.

So far, it's been rock-solid. No problems whatsoever. It's run. Every update is applied, no issues. It just works.

Well, like I said, with Global Dashboard, we have the ability to aggregate that all under a single pane of glass. We've only got one instance, but I've seen it where they've got numerous instances underneath that and it seems to all work just fine.

I haven't used the technical support.

Well, like I said, we've got multiple vendors. Actually I came from an IBM background initially, but also a Lenovo background and then I took on the HP architecture products, just because they knew I had a background in X86.

I'm the one who set it all up in our lab. It was very easy. Very straightforward. So, it goes in very simply. We have it running in our virtualization forum and it manages everything we have there.

I think in general, we looked for responsiveness, and the ability to get to the people you need to get to when you have an issue or a problem. Obviously product quality, I think is going to be another huge consideration. Then for me, reselling this, a lot of the management products are going to be a big key.

Take your time. Learn the features. Learn how it integrates in your environment and it'll serve you well.

Well, it's in my lab right now. It's great because it tracks warranty and support status but it also gives me the ability to go in and configure server profiles. It's primarily in a blade enclosure. I can manage server profiles and I can manage networks, all from one place.

Well, it gives me the ability to also do firmware updates and schedule those and track those firmware updates so I can see if it complies with a profile for firmware and drivers and all that.

Well I was at the booth and I guess they're going to announce it here in a few minutes, the version 3.1 and all the stuff that they've added in 3.1. It just keeps getting better, more support for more hardware, more functionality.

Well, the newer hardware, that's the biggest thing. You've got some of the newer StoreVirtual devices and more functionality in the storage networking and iSCSI stuff, and support for some of those arrays.

It was kind of rough around the edges in version 1 but much stabler in 1.2. Version 2 and version 3 are much, much, much better.

Well, you can scale it but they've got tools. It can only go to so many enclosures. I think it's 40 enclosures. 20 or 40, I can't remember exactly. But they built a manager of managers to do more capacity and more installations.

Well when you're a partner you don't get HP Tech Support on your demo licenses so I had to build it myself but I managed to get through it and it's not inherently hard but you've got to pay attention to the details.

I was using the previous solution, Insight Control and HPSim, so this is much better.

There wasn't really and option for alternative solutions as we're an HP partner.

When considering vendors it is important that they have support for their products. If you buy one solution, you want to be able to manage that and maybe other solutions so they're starting to pull in the rack mount servers for OneView as well, so that will become a nice ecosystem. You can deal with storage networking and other various servers with the same interface.

You have got to look at the economics because it's not free.

You can use OneView to monitor, so if all you need is something to go in and give an alert that something's broken, that's fine, that's free. But if you want the management capabilities and the drill down and more configuration doing things, then you're going to have to buy the licenses.

I like the ability that we can manage multiple enclosures within OneView. It's like one stop shopping. You can manage all the server profiles, you can do everything from a blade enclosure standpoint using OneView. That's one of the things I like.

Benefits include ease of use and one stop shopping. Just one place to go to manage your infrastructure.

I can't think of any improvements off hand honestly. I know we tend to have issues with our server profiles. That's something that we've not really dug deep into, but that seems to be a problem. When we're changing server profiles and applying them we run into some red flags occasionally.

It seems to be a very stable product for us.

I totally think it's scalable. I don't know the limits, as far as the number of enclosures and that type of stuff that it can support, but for the size of our environment it's very scalable.

I haven't used the technical support.

We didn't have a solution previously. This was part of a larger product that we did for bringing in a three part storage, and migrating the new 3PAR and C7000 enclosures.

The setup was straightforward.

I would recommend it. I think it sounds like that's the way that HP is driving everything, to the OneView type user interface. I know the management console for 3PAR is very similar to OneView, so I think they're just driving things to that type of user interface. They are also willing to work side by side with you.