HPE OneView Reviews

It's an awesome replacement for Insight Manager and Virtual Connect Manager.

OneView is a large platform, so asking me, "What are the benefits of OneView," Well, how much time do you have?

I think one of them has to be a single place to login to configure everything at a particular site, instead of logging into Virtual Connect and iLO and Onboard Administrator multiple times a day, you login once to OneView and single-sign on to all your work for the rest of the day.

The inventory report needs improving. I think it's ridiculous that on the inventory report for a DL380, they have the iLO host name.

For blades, which is a majority of my infrastructure, they have, "enclosure name, bay number." That just does not help me understand what that server is. As an IT guy, I already have to take the server name and match it up with the application that's running on it and the business owner and I have a way to do that.

Some Excel tricks make that pretty easy. When I can't even start with a server name or an iLO name, that makes it really hard to start with, so that's my first request. I've been asking for that for some time.

The V3.1 feature that adds the OS name isn't a good replacement for that, because it requires Agentless Management Service running in the host OS to get the OS name into OneView and they're getting that OS name out of iLO anyway, so why not get the iLO host name instead of, "enclosure name, bay number?"

Except for version 3.00.04, stability is very good. That version was only out for about five or six days before they pulled it and I was unfortunately one of those that downloaded it and installed it and rebooted it. It has a tendency to take down your fiber channel connectivity in C7000 with Virtual Connect.

I'm well under the limit, so I don't really understand the scalability.

I have noticed that my test environment with 50, 60 servers and runs a lot snappier than the 500 servers. It's so close in performance that you really have to be watching to notice any performance difference, but as far as scalability is concerned, it handles everything that I do.

I'm pretty sure I'm way under the limits.

Technical support on a scale from one to ten, I'd have to rate at 8/10.

Sometimes you get people who know OneView backwards and forwards, sometimes you get people that seems like it's their first phone call on OneView, so it depends on who you get connected to.

I was tired of Insight Manager and Virtual Connect Manager and their limitations.

Version 1.0 was ridiculous. The setup was way too complex compared to iLO, Onboard Administrator, Virtual Connect Manager.

The LDAP configuration that HP has been doing for decades on those types of remote management appliances, apparently none of that was used in V1.0 and even V2.0 OneView. In the later versions of V2.0, the setup was less complex. V3.0 was I think finally, well V3.1 was a really good product, I think.

We didn't consider alternative solutions. We are strictly HP.

When I'm looking for a vendor of management tools, specifically management tools as opposed to just looking for a vendor - when I'm looking for a management tool vendor, I want to use the software or hardware manufacturer first, because they usually do the best job and have the best insight into how their equipment works.

I would say that I'm focusing on very small minutiae that bug me in my negative feedback. Overall, OneView is a fantastic replacement for Virtual Connect Manager and it's a fantastic replacement for Insight Manager.

There are just some things that I hope are enhancements that'll be resolved soon that I'd advise people to watch out for, especially if they're important to them.

In the latest version, I like the way that everything's been consolidated and brought together. One single pane of glass for management.

It's easier for the customer to manage in terms of reporting and getting their information out. They don't have to switch to different screens like they do with solutions from other vendors. They don't have to overlay extra, additional software on top to get the information they need.

I'd like to see more integration across Hypervisor and 3PAR storage and other storage products.

It's very stable. It's fine. Never had an issue.

Scalability is fine. No problems. We've got a customer that runs it across three data centers, five 3PARs. So, it's all good.

Technical support is above average. Sometimes they're a little bit slow on the 3PAR stuff to get back to us as a partner when we're trying to decode updates and things like that. There are a lot of code updates going on around the world at the same time. That's why I'm not saying average. It's high above average.

We always sell OneView to our customers, but they use other management tools.
For us, choosing a vendor is about the scale of the solution, how stable it is and how easy it is for a customer to move from one solution to the other.

Setup is straightforward. We are Service One certified partners, so we can install.

We have tested HDS, CMC, and Nimble.

Use HPE to your advantage. Get the trial licenses, see how it works and then you'll be happy with it once you roll it out.

Valuable for us are ease of use, central management, and I think auto support.

Auto support, because we don't want to have to worry about managing failures like hard drives and power supplies. With this feature now it automatically updates HP and notifies our value-added reseller which is Pricon.

As a matter of fact, they know about the failure before I know about the failure, which is convenient.

I like the ability with OneView where I'm able to set up templates for profiles and to be able to apply that same profile configuration to multiple blades.

We run VMware so it's always nice to have all the BIOS settings the exact same and everything else the exact same. So with the template, it makes it easier to deploy that.

I can't think of any additional features now to be honest with you. Maybe granular permissions. Because, right now, I have off-shore support in India.

I want to give them the ability to be able to login to OneView and only do certain things. I want to give them the ability to get access to the console of the physical server right through to iLO.

In OneView, the permissions need to be done better because right now I can only select a server administrator, a storage administrator, and a network administrator as far as my options are concerned. When I pick a server administrator, the user in India has iLO access but he also has the ability to do damage to the servers.

He's able to get in and delete things and mess up things. I don't want that ability. If I make him a read-only user, then he doesn't have the access to do anything except just read what's in OneView. He can't access the iLO.

I would like the ability to not only do server administration but beneath that, say, I get them console access or iLO access, as those features are available in the iLO themselves already today but not in OneView.

Regarding stability, there have been no problems, there have been no crashes with it whatsoever.

Scalability works very well with the proxy we have. There are a couple of proxies we have that it doesn't work with, which we are trying to hopefully get resolved.

There are some HP products that are not sold very well by HP such as the SL210T's which are not supported by OneView. But all our Proliants and our blades are all supported so we're happy with that.

Technical support has been good. They've been responsive and they've been able to solve my issues in a timely manner. They're very helpful.

Most of our support goes right through Pricon for a lot of things but I contact HP support for a few things as well.

Actually our value-added reseller, Pricon, is the one who told us about OneView. Previously we were just using the C7 management console.

I guess the setup was a little bit complex. I had to go through a lot of Google documentation and Google Talking because there really wasn't too much out there regarding the steps to go through to do it. I noticed here a nice little wizard which walks you through steps 1 through 15, which is kind of nice.

HP came in with Pricon and showed us the OneView demonstration and we thought that was a really cool product. What really sold me on it was auto support. That was what I wanted, auto support.

We needed a technology partner that could help us move forward with our company. Help us with product decisions. I think HP and Pricon have been doing good on that.

It does make your life much easier. The single-plated glass, the templates and the auto support really takes a lot of that remedial stuff away from the administrators who need to be focusing on more important things and it allows it to automate a lot of features.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass. Also, it is easy to use.

It makes us more agile. It makes integration and things of that nature much easier.

Off the top of my head, I don't have any comment.

Stability is excellent.

One of the great parts about it is the scalability.

I have not used technical support.

It's a particular tool to help us in managing our environment. So, it was something that we needed to have. Just something you know when you manage your environment that you have to have a tool like that. It's very good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

To be honest, the price point is pretty spot on.

I would definitely advise them to work with HPE. Their products speak for themselves. They do what they say they're going to do. And HPE, changing the way they have over the last couple years, it's been amazing. I've enjoyed it immensely.

Its ease of use, i.e., just being able to easily deploy a server is the most valuable feature. That's terrific.

It saves a loads of time. We had a number of enclosures that we brought in and it was like "bam" we're done.

Seeing how I know there isn't gonna be a next release, the gooey is kind of unstable a little bit. That's probably my biggest freight I really can't think of anything cause it's pretty straight forward.
Just a little bit more of ease of use in the setup. Now that I've done it twice, it's much easier but we had a consultant who was helping us. He was like, “Zoom we're going through this' Iand was like 'Wait a minute what happened here?” So, it was very, very quick.

On a scale of 1 to 10, it's about an eight. There are some stability problems. Every once in a while, we'll just have to restart because it's freaking out. For the majority part, really there are no problems.

The product scales quite a bit.

Our first experience with the technical support was with one of the other products that is associated with OneView, which is ICSP, and the support was pretty poor. The second one, after we got the right person, it was terrific; it was really wonderful.

We have a significant number of enclosures that we had to add, so we just knew that we needed to move up to a different class of data center, so as to be able to mange things in one location.

Somebody who is stable, someone who has the personnel to answer the questions and someone who has great technical support are the factors that we look for while selecting a vendor; HPE needs that to some extent. Like I have mentioned earlier, I'm not 100% satisfied with it, but overall, it's pretty good.

The setup was complex because we made it complex. We tried to install it when everything wasn't ready, i.e., our storage wasn't ready so we couldn't really set the storage piece. We tried to kind of fiddle with it and ended up destroying everything; thus we had to recreate it all.

Use it, absolutely use it, i.e., if you're using the HPE infrastructure as it makes your life so much easier.

Its ease of use and that it is a single-pane-of-glass are the most valuable features.

It enables faster deployment and it is easy to see the issues. Reporting is just much easier, it is just a better functionality.

There is need to make it a bit easier to federate across all of our OneVew implementations that we have, so just make it easier.

The lack of dashboard and reporting functionalities is not clear. They should carry more solutions to try and get the reporting that I need out of all of my different storage devices, i.e., VBAs and Blue Cars; they've got to do a better job and unify it for us. Currently, it's not there and it is very difficult to report.

Stability is a hit and miss.

We're not fully there yet, i.e., in the sense to fully leverage the scalability. However, we do know that it's available to us. Let's just say, it is an early adoption for us.

Responsiveness is the most important factor while selecting a vendor.

The setup was actually straightforward.

We evaluated HPE, just because they're prevalent in our environment. From the hardware perspective, we looked at SHI, on the networking side we evaluated Cisco and on the virtualization side, we evaluated Veeam, Microsoft, and Red Hat.

The reason why we decided to choose HPE is because, from a server-hardware vendor, their R&D budget is the largest and they invest the most than any other vendor, that's out there right now. So, that was the primary reason. They appear to be more cutting-edge than anybody else in terms of both the hardware and the software right now.

To make it easier, HPE is a good solution. If you have the time to engineer and customize a solution, then you will be fine with it or with any other vendor or even with a white box, for that matter. Typically in terms of flexibility and speed, HPE is a good solution.

One-pane-of-glass, i.e., being able to manage all our facets of hardware through one-pane-of-glass, is the most valuable feature.

It has improved the working of our organization by providing more consistency within our firmware, drivers, firmware baseline and server profiling; thus it provides more consistency.

There should be an easier management of the driver and firmware baseline.

The stability of the solution is unfavorable. We have had some struggles with OneView. We have seen a lot of errors and a lot of open cases. We are progressively seeing text that says “Upgrade! Upgrade! Upgrade!”. That is not what I want to hear when I have a production issue. I can't just take down a production server to upgrade. They need to fix the problem rather than constantly chasing our tails to upgrade.

We're growing into multiple data centers, so having multiple OneView instances, is something that we're just deploying now. I'm not completely familiar with it yet, so we'll see.

The support has been a struggle at times. On the server side, it has been a little bit better than on the storage side; the storage side has been a real struggle. Some of the biggest issues that we ran into were that we have a pretty strong regional team. But, when our regional team coordinates with the global support team, on the HPE 3PAR side, there's a big disconnect and then as the customer, we get hit on it.

Previously, we were using a different hardware vendor. The inconsistency of the drivers and firmware was one of the strongest reasons as to why we switched to HPE.

The setup was fairly straightforward. The UI was easy to use, which was good.

We looked at other solutions namely IBM, Dell, and Cisco. It was a business relationship for choosing HPE, as well as their price-point, was strong. At the time, the Gartner reports indicated HPE was the leading vendor from a server/hardware perspective, so that is why we selected this solution.

Leverage your technical account managers (TAMs) and your technical advisors when deploying the hardware.

The most valuable feature is having a one-pane-of-glass so that we can see the HPE environment, i.e., the blades and DL380s.

Instead of having to go directly to the aisle of cards and to look at the blades to see what's going on, we're able to just go to OneView, have that one-pane-of-glass and get an idea of what's going on with the server.

There is a need for more integration. For example, I haven't really looked into integration with the Microsoft System Center, or things along those lines, so that we could move to even a more single-pane-of-glass.

Stability has been really great, we don't have any issues with stability at all.

Since we're a small shop, I've never had any scalability issues; we don't have that many issues. We don't have that much hardware, so I can't really say, one way or the other.

I forgot the other product's name, we were using the previous version of one of the HPE tools. Once they were switching over to OneView, we decided to switch over to OneView, so that we'd get that one-pane-of-glass.

Reliability and support are the main two things that we look at while selecting a vendor.

Go ahead and do it. It gives you that one-pane-of-glass and makes life a lot easier than trying to go into each server and seeing what's going on.