HPE OneView Reviews

I've been working with OneView off-and-on for about five and a half years, first on the operations side, mostly managing hardware and maintaining it. More recently, I've been spending more time on the engineering side, making sure that we're building stuff, seeing what we can do as far as automating, and getting all of our profiles more generalized so that there are fewer questions about what a particular piece of hardware has.

From the engineering side, we're seeing some nice benefits from just being able to pull everything in and configure it without having to spend time running down to the data center, spend time rebooting anything. We can make our configuration changes and then, a month later, when everything goes through reboots, it just picks it up. So we can plan this stuff out a lot more carefully and more cleanly.

From my early days, the big value was in hardware replacement and repair. We could literally swap out a piece of hardware, slide one back into the chassis, and immediately - about three reboots later - it was identical. We didn't have to worry about configuring it, we didn't have to spend any time getting anything into place. It came back and it healed the environment almost immediately.

The area that I'm currently looking to explore is API-based automation. Thus far, I haven't gotten very far in it, so I can't really say where we are at, looking for that. Other than that, at the moment, we don't have a big need for more features. We need the time to really dig in to it and expand our usage of it.

We had one issue a couple of years ago with a slightly older version, where it became incredibly unstable. It took us several days of working with the techs to get it back into a good state, and it required multiple escalations.

Outside of that, it's been very good overall. The main problem that we run into, as far as stability goes, is when something loses its profile. Sometimes it requires jumping through a number of "hoops" to really get it back.

Broadly speaking, it is scalable.

The main issue we had - I think we were on version 2 at the time, and version 3 had just come out - was actually a scalability problem. We had some stuff that fell out of the environment due to a data center move, and it was taking so long to time-out on the old stuff that it would reboot itself, repeatedly, without ever becoming functional.

Otherwise, we've added hundreds upon hundreds of systems into it, dozens of new profiles, clone profiles, everything. And it has performed to the performance level we expect.

The only time we had to call, it was a very weird issue, so I think it's a little difficult for us to comment on tech support. When we have had minor issues, they've been resolved very quickly, their response has been very good. The bigger stuff has required multiple escalations. We did wind up getting the right people on the phone, it just took a little while.

The setup is very straightforward. We loaded the virtual appliance, pointed at the old one, pulled the database in, and we were already running.

The time that we have saved on hardware configuration and reconfiguration, both on the operations and engineering sides, would definitely pay for the product.

The very simple fact if we have to buy another chassis, or we're configuring a chassis, we can take an existing profile, clone it out, and put it on the new hardware and it just reconfigures all the hardware for us, that saves us time. Instead of manually reconfiguring the chassis, and 16 blades, and getting all the networking done, and then getting all the Fibre Channel done. We just hook it all up and we spend a few minutes doing the networking and then we're done.

At this point, I'd rate it about an eight out of 10. It's doing the job that we need it to, it's doing that job well. Sometimes the interface can be a little confusing, sometimes the error messages can be very cryptic, as far as what's actually going on. But on the whole, the product does what it sets out to do and does it well.

Monitoring of services and networks. The performance has been pretty good.

It provides a single view of all the systems.

• Comprehensive dashboard
• Ease of use

I would like to see them expand into other cloud platforms, non-HPE platforms.

It's pretty stable.

So far, it has been scalable for us.

Technical support is pretty good. Time of response is good.

We are an HPE shop so we didn't look around much.

Setup was straightforward.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• support
• scalability
• stability - the uptime has to be close to 99.99 percent.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10 because it's stable, it works.

The ease of installation and use help you to come up with a turnkey solution as quickly as possible. For people who are not fully technical, the comprehensive dashboard is useful.

• IT infrastructure monitoring
• Business app monitoring
• Decreases time of operations to react to incidents.
• Decreases the amount of incidents.

• Gain proactive reactions on incidents.
• Gives the business interfaces to view real-time pictures of IT business services.

• Universality of product
• Broad range of integration points for third-party software
• Broad range of tools to create executive and operations dashboards.

I think HPE could make more user-friendly interfaces, exclude Java and move to an HTML5 platform, make more detailed documentation, and lower the price.

I have 200-plus services in around 40 different locations, therefore I need to be assured that I know when things break down, a disk goes bad, etc. So, I can see it, use the global dashboard, and give that view to our operations guys so they can see if something goes wrong. The work is 24/7, however I do not work those hour, so my team can see it and that is basically what I am using it for. I used to use other products, an old HPE SIEM that was not so good. This one is definitely better.

It gives us a view of all our servers, which we did not have before in real-time. It is definitely an improvement for the guys that are sitting and watching the servers.

We can actually see if a server in China goes missing a disk or something. We can respond right away. It calls back. Or, if you have set it up, it actually calls HPE directly, if something is wrong and they respond to it. It is actually a quite good feature. It happens approximately within one minute.

I had some minor difficulties with upgrading, but the solution still works fine. That is basically it. I can see what I want. I am still looking for more improvements. I am not that into the deployment part. I am more into viewing on a global scale what goes well, and what goes bad. I do not apply using the tool, yet. I am not sure I am going to use it, because I have had a bad experience with some other products, so I am not sure I am going that way. However, with the monitoring and the management part, it is very good.

With upgrades, it simply stopped. It was the database. It was not digitized correctly, so they fixed it pretty fast. In this particular case, technical support was very responsive.

When I did the upgrade with help from HPE, and it went through, I saw that I was able to switch on remote support. So, I connected to see what our contract was like. Was it 24/7 or 9/5? So, I accidentally turned it on, and maybe I should not have, but it started enabling remote support on all our services. This is definitely something I would like to more heavily rely on, because we need to see if we forgot a server. We have about 200, and we could easily have forget one.

We cannot travel around to all our offices, so some got lost, it happens. Maybe we forgot to buy an extended contract or something. We have an external firm, as well, to help us with that. So, I would like to see that. I saw it was turned on, but I could not change things. I would like to extend that contract to a 24/7, and not 9/5, so you could click that button that said, "Are you sure?" Yes, I am sure. Okay, I am going to puff it up for you, and I am going to send you an extra bill. That is fine by me. I would like that.

No issues.

I have to chop it up into smaller parts, because I have an installation in Europe and it covers the whole world. That is not so good. So, I am going to make some Data Senders around the world. Because if I have to patch the server, it is not the greatest way to do it from Europe to China, or something like that. They need to be more localized, so I am going to chop it up into smaller bits.

Sometimes, we have had a few breakdowns when some other parts was so bad. They did not respond properly, and after some discussions they did. Now, everything moves quickly. I do not have to open tickets at the moment.

We had to stop using the previous solution, because it was the old HPE SIEM product. It continuously crashed for us. We used it to monitor our storage and our service, and it did not work. So, we stopped using any product at all for about a year, then we heard about this one. I was talking to our Account Manager and said, "I need this one, because then I can actually see what is going on."

Of course, it is been a long journey for OneView 1.0, but now it is actually working and we can see all our servers, even the small ones that we have. We have offices of 2500 people, and offices with five people. So, we have small servers, microservers, actually. There is a difference from big to small, and we are actually able to see all of them. Maybe we cannot manage the small ones, but we can monitor them and the big ones. A great feature.

I was involved in the initial setup. It was straightforward. I just read the manual.

No. We are strictly HPE products.

Do not expect wonders, but use it as it is, as a tool to monitor and manage if you want to. Especially monitor, because it can give you a headstart on any problems. It could warn you if the fan is running high-pitch, if the temperature is high, and so on. So, it is actually giving you a headstart. That is the advice.

Use it, but do not think it is going into the clouds, because it is not. There is room for improvement.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They are honest. I do not care if it has flaws and it does not work exactly as they say, as long as they say, "We are working on this, and it might not work exactly how we say it will, but it's where we are going forward." This is actually one of the things I value the most.

Monetary hardware. It is performing very well.

Cost. You can streamline and deploy services faster.

Deploying faster new virtual services. 

There was a feature called HPE cloud manager, but now it is owned by Micro Focus. HPE should make a cloud optimizer again.

The stability is very good. I have never had an issue with it over the three years that I have been using it.

Scalability is great.

Technical support performs well. I have never had an issue with them.

Use it. It is free.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: stability and technical support.

We manage our datacenter stuff.

It's performing well.

It makes the deployment of the firmware updates much faster, and the baselines. We don't really use template management much, but it does help to get a start. It also helps if you can deploy a template and update from the template, so everything is the same. And you know it is the same, so that's an important feature.

The template management, so the firmware updates can be done from the software.

I saw, maybe three years ago or two years ago here, or in Barcelona, at the HPE Discover conference, a feature that you can update Clusterware with VMware. But the feature is still not live in production. So it would be nice if you could roll out all your firmware updates seamlessly with vCenter updates and it would remediate at the cluster level of VMware. So it would keep track of how many hosts can reboot at one time. Maybe parallel updates. So you can do all at once.

Currently, you have to do all the firmware updates and then you have to do the VMware updates. So you have two reboots and it would be better if it was just one.

In general, I think the development of new features should go faster.

It's stable. It functions. We have no problems whatsoever with stability.

We're quite static, we haven't needed to scale.

Tech support is good.

With the Smart Update Tools we had some issues with the integration, and they didn't really find out what was happening. So that wasn't very good, but all the other cases were good. Ninety percent of the time it's been good.

We were just using the predecessor of the software, HPE SIM.

Straightforward.

I was able to do it myself.

In general, when selecting a vendor we look for 

• reliability
• enterprise-ready is very important for us
• support
• how they stand in the market. Is there enough information available? Do they have enough customers to know that it is secure, stable?
• Pricing is also an issue.

I rate it an eight out of 10 and that's mostly because it's good software. It's getting better every day, and more integrations are coming. But the feature I mentioned above that is still not there, it could go faster.

And you see that HPE has problems, sometimes, supporting older product ranges. And I think it costs a lot of effort to keep them supported. And new ranges are coming out and they also have to be supported.

I would advise using this software if you're using HPE, of course, because you don't have to put in any effort. But it depends. I think it's good software for us, but I cannot say for sure regarding someone else's situation. If they have the same stuff we have, like hardware and blades, then I would recommend it.

We use this for monitoring our hardware. It is performing fine. 

We cannot function without this solution. 

• Primarily the monitoring capabilities
• A clear overview of the whole environment, the health of the whole environment

There are some important features for security in the next version. That is one of the better improvements. 

It has improved over time. It has become significantly better.

It is sometimes limited between what we see and in the next version that there will be in the global dashboard, and it will help us to get a global overview. For now, we are in separate instances. 

I have not used technical support.

We have been using it four years, and also the previous version, HBC. 

I am happy with the price. It is good.

It is a necessary tool for us and it works well. I would recommend it to a colleague at another company looking for a similar solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: There are multiple factors - the stability, the pricing in some parts, etc.

HPE OneView is an overview of a server infrastructure. It is performing really well. 

We are guessing up-to-date that it has improved efficiency across the board, and it has basically made our lives a lot easier since we can react a lot faster to any business requirements. 

By being able to deploy servers very quickly and rapidly, we can respond to any business requirement needed. 

Additional APIs.

It is very stable. We have had no downtime nor issues in approximately a year. 

It scales well.

I only used technical support during the initial trial and setup process. I felt that they were knowledgeable and answered me immediately.

We decided we needed this solution when we came to HPE's event in 2016 London. 

Initial setup is fairly straightforward.

We had HPE engineers on the phone. 

There are no other real products out there at the moment which do the same thing as OneView. 

Buy the product. It is really good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Honest, reputable vendor, and one that we tend to have a good working relationship as well with. 

Managing our C7000, at this moment. In the future, it will be managing Synergy too, hopefully. We have a version 3 and a version 1.2, but the upgrade process from the 1.2 to the 3 is kind of an issue. However, the performance is good.

We lose less time managing the machines.

Managing everything from one screen, so we do not have to open another screen for every machine. It saves a lot of time for us.

OS deployment, but it is in version 4 with Synergy.

So far, so good. We had a couple issues with the earlier version, but I do not think those issues will occur now.

It should scale to what we will need in the future.

Technical support is not very good. The engineers do not know a lot about the product, even when asked simplistic questions.

If you have a lot of devices, like we do, then you have to have one single pane of view, otherwise we lose too much time. So, we needed this type of solution, and it is the only option HPE offers.

No.

I would recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reliability and good support.

Twice a year we do a server buy. We get in maybe 20 blade chassis. So, we would have a significant amount of servers to actually provision. We use OneView to change all the buyer settings, and it stops us having to go into each server and do it manually, which normally takes about ten minutes per server. However, we can just use OneView, do it all together, and have the whole thing setup and ready to be provisioned by the OS. 

That is what we use it for, and it is performing really well.

• The speed that we can provision servers
• The automatic case logging with HPE 

They are pretty good.

The most valuable thing is the speed, in which we can provision servers, and the remote support, which is automatically set up as well. The remote support automatically logs service calls and support cases with HPE, which is really good.

One thing which is missing is that you can't actually log a support call yourself. So, it's automatic, if a machine has gone wrong. However, sometimes it does not actually log a call for you, so it would be nice to actually be able to click "submit a case" within OneView instead of having to go out, login to Insight Remote Support's website and do it from there. That would be a good feature.

I know there is a new version (v.4), but we are using v.3.1, which is pretty stable. We have not had any downtime in our six months of use.

You can throw as many servers at it as you want. So, there is no problem there.

I have not used technical support yet.

We did not have a previous solution.

We needed a solution for a long time just to save time, because if you are doing 120 servers and having to go into each one, boot it up, wait for it to reboot, and change settings, then you might make mistakes if you are doing that many servers. So, just to have it all automated and being able to do it in one go, it is quite good. 

The initial setup was straightforward enough. You just need the VM, then load the software on and away it goes.

By myself; in-house.

Before looking into the solution, I was looking for something which could buy us changes, but at the time, HPE had some other solutions, but they were actually quite expensive to buy. So, when OneView came along, it was kind of reasonable in terms of price for licenses, etc.

No. We are a big HPE site. We use HPE SA and HPE OO for OS provisioning.

Go for it, because its ease of use and setting it up. Once setup, then it is more or less, forget about it. It just works away in the background.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: ease of use. If you are talking about an application like OneView, this was ease of use. The desktop and the dashboard are actually quite good. We have the dashboard up on a big screen, and you can actually see when things go wrong or if there are any faults with any of the servers. The backup is automated as well, so the appliance is quite good.

We want it to improve our organization. We feel like we're in this cycle of transition of products, from SIM to OneView, and we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but the tunnel seems to stretch. It's quite long.

I hate to say, not a lot. It's encouraging to see a couple of features in version 4 that we think ought to have been there from the start. So, we can see the development path, but so far it's been limited in what we've gotten out of it.

Those features coming in version 4 that we're looking for are the discovery, primarily. But I think the scope-based access control is of interest, although, we didn't see any directory integration, so that, in itself, seems like it's still limited. 

At the scale we're using it, which is not much, I don't think stability is something we could comment on, really. It's fine for what we've been using it for.

Depending on the ability to discover, we'll be able to answer the question of whether it will meet our needs going forward.

I think we've got the information we need. It's more of a product-set lack rather than support lack.

When we're looking at vendors we look for the product itself and innovation. With respect to the HPE, that's what we look for, and dependability and standardization, rather than going too proprietary on things. Integration as well as strong partnerships with the likes of VMware. We are a VMware shop and, aside from the current issue, that close tie between the products is of great benefit to us.

Administration-wise it's going to be easier. More smooth and more flexible.

We also have the 3PAR and the GUI is almost the same. So the recognition phase is very good.

It's new for us, so I need to get the hands-on experience first, before I comment on this.

We don't have that much history yet. But the HPE technician who implemented it, he says it is very stable and recommended us to it. Normally he's right.

It will grow with us over time. No concerns here.

They are knowledgeable and responsive. They came onsite to help with the setup.

We have two C7000 enclosures in two different datacenters. And the 1U is in a third datacenter. So our management and surveillance is in the third datacenter. It's straightforward to set up.

We've almost been "married" with HPE for 15 years now. Our network is HPE, storage is HPE, computers, servers, everything is HPE. We have a DS agreement with them. They run our network, and our storage system, and our email. 

We are very glad. Happy with it.

The anticipation of improvement comes from our partner. They have experience with other customers, most of the time bigger customers. They said this is a good direction to start heading in, it's future proof and it will simplify management of your equipment. So we're trusting the partner.

Having one platform to monitor and to access or configure all the servers or the 3PAR, etc.

It's rather simple to use, and that's very important for us. Being an IT person - I'm working for a chemical organization - we have to know a lot, but we can't be specialized in anything. So it's good that it's simple, that we can use it for just normal daily work.

I cannot say. Maybe there will be, but my experience is not deep enough at this moment.

It's a stable product, it's working fine. 

Even thought we just started using it, I'm sure about the scalability. That's also the reason why we started with it. It will become one product we can use more and more, we can add other items to it. It also looks it will be a standard inside HPE. They will keep on using this for a long time.

To be honest, I'm not really communicating with HPE support on this product.

We had some issues when we were implementing 3PAR, then we were communicating and the communication was really good. It was a hard issue, but they really put the effort in it to supporting us and to bring a solution. I appreciated it. Even if it was not a nice time, they did everything that was possible to fix it.

We have not been using it so long actually. It was implemented by our partner a few months ago and now we are starting to put all our equipment inside OneView.

At this time I would say it's an eight out of 10, which is rather good, because the product is working. It's implemented at our site and we can use it without many problems, and it is being used - and that's very important. Very often you implement a product and there it stops. But it's really being used. I'm looking at it, very often. I will not say every day, but often.

More efficient. We're quicker in solving problems, taking action to solve problems.

It monitors all our servers, and if there is any problem it straight away sends us an alert. If It's a faulty component, we can see it from there. It sends an alert.

The interface is a bit bland. It does its job, but it could have a better interface.

We've had no issues whatsoever, so far.

It should meet our needs going forward, but we're probably looking into buying, at some point, the paid version of OneView. It gives you extra, but we need to see what it gives you. Within one year, I reckon.

They're quite responsive, actually. Whenever we've had any issues and raised a ticket, they've straightened it up within an hour, maximum. And then, even if there is a component that we need to have replaced, they send an engineer or they send the component on that day.

We're quite happy actually with HP support.

HPE has been around for years and we know they're going to be for even longer. We're quite happy using them over the years, from the previous management up to now, everyone's happy with it. Everything we ask for is there. Support-wise they're great, product-wise they have what we need. I'm quite happy, overall.

For the version that we have, I give it eight out of 10, because it does exactly what we need. Obviously with a better interface, maybe be 10 out of 10.

I like that it is quite easy to

• add servers and get them monitored and manageable
• create templates for server profiles
• see if all my servers are on correct firmware levels, with SPP packaging.

It needs more reporting capabilities.

I haven't had any real downtime. I have experienced when it hangs for a couple of seconds, or minutes, but no downtime. When it hangs it's quite annoying, everything should happen immediately.

In regards to scalability, it is going to meet our needs, at least now. I have eight 1U instances, that cover the central environment and also the distributed environments that we have. I'm going to install the global dashboard, so we have the umbrella over everything, so it's easy to see and manage it.

Tech support is knowledgeable, responsive. I have good contacts, so they do care.

The setup is much simpler. I was working with the previous product, HPE SIM, and that was a lot worse to set up. This is really easy to set up.

I rate it a seven out of 10 because I think it has good potential, and they are developing it more and more, so it's getting better and better.

OneView is a tool that we use primarily to speed up the deployment operations of infrastructure. We use it to eliminate human error in deployments and it allows us to compute much faster. It gives us a very easy program for the REST API interface. To summarize, the benefits are speed of deployment and reduced errors

In terms of our role as a HPE reseller, we are able to provide a distinct solution in the market place. It really helps our customers do a better job deploying infrastructure faster. One of the things we do is provide skills transfer.

I would like to see some GUI based features around decommissioning hardware. The management tools in the existing HPE infrastructure were good, but they were aging. That's really where OneView kind of made their mark from the ground up with an all new solution. They actually started from the ground up to just understand that our existing management tools were aging and we needed to improve that. That was a big thing to us.

The solution is pretty stable. We are in revision 3. It has been over three years now, and every revision has gotten better. One of the advantages of OneView is that even if something happens, it doesn't affect the work.

Scalability is decent. They've recently released a tool called OneView mobile dashboard. This allows you to aggregate a number of OneView appliances. The benefit is that the OneView implementation can be in separate data centers and you can aggregate things. Individual scalability was already decent and then with the addition of One View mobile dashboard, it has significantly improved.

Technical support is pretty good and it is getting better all the time. When the tool set first launched, the HPE support organization had some challenges. From what I've heard from customers, the consensus is that the HPE support staff is getting better.

At the time, we were managing our HPE blade systems with Virtual Connect Manager and an on-board administrator. This was the normal HPE tool set that existed at the time.

When choosing a vendor, support is important. As a re-seller, when we take a product to market and sell it to costumers, we really need to be confident that we've been able to put it through its paces. We want to know about the testing and quality assurance ourselves. We don’t want to take the vendor's word for it.

Once we've decided to move forward with that partnership, it becomes important for us that we have a deep bench system behind us. If we run out of runway, we want to know that we've got a partner to resolve things for us.

The initial setup was straightforward.

HPE was a big one on our short list. We also have reseller relationships with Dell, Nutanics, and Pure Storage. We represent about 50 different vendors. We chose HPE, because we feel like they have the most complete kind of eco-system level vision.

If you have HPE compute in place today, you should definitely look at using OneView. If you're looking at selecting a compute vendor, I think HPE OneView is a compelling reason to go with HPE.

The most valuable feature is the 360 dashboard.

It provides centralized management.

I would like to see a better backup feature so I can manage data protection better.

The product has good stability.

I haven’t tried to scale it yet.

Technical support was great.

We did not use a previous solution. We focus on HPE products.

It was a complex installation. The user guide was missing content about the configuration.

We did not evaluate any other options.

The deployment was easy. It has many features. It’s a great solution and it is easy to use. It provides a good inventory of your hardware and firmware.

The automation that we get within OneView and the visibility across all of our different products are the most valuable features.

As they continue to add into the product, it makes the provisioning process that much easier and more seamless.

So for us, as we continue to scale on multiple locations, we wanted to have a one view into all of that infrastructure, i.e., not having to go into all the individual products for all the different types of storage, compute, etc. It's that flexibility across all the different infrastructure platforms that we wanted this solution.

If I remember correctly, our CTO was saying that he wants to see a little bit more of integration into the HPE StoreVirtual VSA product. I know that it's either supposed to be or was recently added, but it's coming soon or is already there. I'm just not one hundred percent sure where it's as of now and that is one piece.

We now have a new HPE 3PAR added as well. I'm pretty sure that we can do what we need to do with that, but there might have been something my CTO was saying that he wanted to see integrated. I don't know what that is from the top of my head but, I'm pretty sure it's on the roadmap to actually get that implemented soon anyway.

We've been using HPE OneView for a couple of years and for a couple of our nodes. Then, we were waiting for the most recent release to come out so that we could backfill all of our blade nodes, i.e., just to help with the overall operations. So, we have been using this solution for really about a couple of years, but predominantly, within the last six months.

It's definitely very stable. Also, being able to import in all of our existing blade nodes, VMs and the storage was a seamless process. We had no problems with that, i.e., from what I understand and I haven't heard anything that has trickled up to my desk, anyway.

I foresee it meeting my future needs. We've got around twenty blade chassis and there are from, anywhere about, 12 to 16 hosts in each one of those. We still have a few more sets of infrastructure and some of our other geographies that we haven't licensed yet, but we'll definitely look to add that on here soon.

Technical support is fantastic. The support that we get, and actually, we just recently got a bunch of credits with this new program that has come out, they always meet our needs. The local guys are very good. I haven't seen any concerns probably in the last decade. We've been a long-standing HPE partner and the support has been very well.

The setup is very straightforward. You can even do it just by following the step-by-step instructions, i.e., if you're more adventurous and want to get into that. We, actually, had an engagement and had someone to help us on a webinar, i.e., a little bit of taking over control and helping us get it taken care of. However, it was a very straightforward process. There was definitely nothing that was out of the norm.

Choosing a vendor really starts with R&D, i.e., an organization that puts a lot of their money back in investing into new products and trying to make sure that the research is funded and moving forward is pretty important to us. Of course, that speaks to their brand. Outside of that, certainly support and then, really at the end, after all of those features cost is going to be the next factor that we look at. As long as they're competitive in the market and I am not looking for the least cost option, but definitely, having that runway to know that the roadmap is going to continue where we want to go and it's not just going to get dropped off/acquired. These are the factors that sum up as to how we look at a vendor when we're going to buy something.

There's always room for an improvement, but, definitely, it meets all of our needs. We're very happy with our OneView purchase and how it provides all that visibility into our entire infrastructure.

You can work in Spanish if you wish.

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.

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.

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.

The ability to administer multiple servers simultaneously, upgrade firmware, and add the client support pack.

The main benefits are a single pane of glass, usability between the servers, storage, and network.

I would love the ability to either import a range of IPs for the ILO, or be able to do a scan. If they could improve the IP range, that would be great.

Stability seems fine. I haven't had any down time.

Scalability seems to be pretty good. It's a little small for what we have right now for a number of servers, but I think it will grow.

I haven't needed technical support.

We did not use a different solution. I try to stick with a vendor with the hardware. When looking for a vendor, specifically for this product, it has to do with our activity and our hardware so we are able integrate our APIs with the system.

I was involved in the initial setup and it was very straightforward.

I would recommend doing a beta test.

Profile templates: The ability to generate the profiles and lay them down so the servers are built consistently. I would say that's probably the biggest piece of it.

To be able to rapidly roll-out a lot of servers consistently and quickly, without having to go in and tweak each thing individually. After we get the template built, we can just apply it and push it down

It's a nice product. It's a little slow sometimes. Overall, I think it does what it's supposed to do. I think that as they evolve it, it'll get quicker.

Stability's been fairly good on OneView, the appliance. In terms of Synergy Composer, which is a OneView central derivative, it is a little slow being on that bare, metal hardware. It would be nice to have one product, OneView, that could manage both Synergy and legacy devices without having two separate products. I understand that's what the dashboard is all about, but it still would be nice to have less components.

We bought Synergy because we were doing a Greenfield and we knew that the writing was on the wall as far as what the future was going to be in terms of Synergy versus C-1000. The choice was to not invest in the older technology, but rather to invest in the newer technology to future-proof ourselves. 

That dictated that we needed a solution. As to why did we chose one or the other, that was basically future proofing. 

It is a little scary to be the "data customer". We're one of the first 50 customers right now to purchase it. Composer is one unit in Synergy, but it's a physical appliance. We also have to other appliances to manage all the old legacy stuff: C-7000, 580s, 380s, anything else you'd want. So we have both of those. It wasn't a choice of one or the other. You have to have this for this and you have to have that for that. 

That single band of class that is kind of the manager of the managers. It really saves a lot of time. One of the main reasons we didn't use OneView sooner with our older environment was one of the initial caveats. Once you brought a box, or you brought a C-7000 chassis into the OneView management purview, it basically took over and did a whole bunch of stuff. You have to plan it out because it took over and you would have to reconfigure things.

Instead of just taking it in, and leaving things in a view-only mode, so I still can see it. Maybe at least I could view it in a single pane glass so I could see where things are at. That was kind of why that supposedly had been fixed. You can now bring things in without outages, but I don't trust it. I will delay the evacuation of a chassis to the time when we bring that in.

The counterpart who I work with did the majority of the actual hands-on setup. He worked with HPE to get them committed. 

On the Synergy side, for Composer, (OneView composer), he also did the deployment for the virtual appliance that we rolled out, our C-7000. For some of the view, we only brought some of our rack mount servers into view-only mode. I use it, but I didn't implement it.

I think the implementation was pretty straightforward from what I could gather. It didn't look too complicated, at least on the appliance side. I've been told that you can create profiles for hardware that you don't have. 

My biggest gripe is that a profile is tethered to a particular hardware type. I would like to be able to take a profile, of more generic nature, and apply it to different types of blades without having to build another profile for that blade type. I would like some inter-operability there, without having to have multiple templates. Other than that, it's been fairly stable. 

I think there are some configuration things you can do in Virtual Connect that can harm you from an availability standpoint. OneView still allows you to do that, which I don't think it should. Those are just my thoughts, as far as a criss-cross between virtual connects, where you can actually create an outage for yourself for updates. But other than that, it has met our needs. I think the biggest things for me are the profiles that I can flip between different hardware types.

As the guy that does the work and not the guy that handles the money, I am interested in whatever makes my job easier. Simple is always better. If it's a simple, straightforward solution, that is always the best solution for me as an engineer. 

For the people that handle the purse strings, I guess money is a greater concern. As far as the technology goes, anything that makes my life easier and I don't get calls in the middle of the night, that's what matters to me. That should matter to the business as well. Obviously, if I'm not getting calls, then things are up. If it's simple, it's better for everybody, in terms of the roll-out times, troubleshooting, and fewer pieces to break.

I would say the only competitor is probably Cisco solution. Their competitive or comparable product, in the OneView space, is kind of the manager of managers, is UCS Central. It has been out for some time. I feel, in some ways, OneView's doing a little catch-up to them. That's just my opinion, as I've used that in the past. 

My company is a very HPE heavy company. They have been way before I came to work here. I think in many respects, you kind of go with what you know and what you are comfortable with. That's what they've always been used to, so they have a good relationship and they've continued on that path.

I think it's good to know that if they already use HPE products, it may not be time to start analyzing whether or not to use competitive products. I think competitively, there are probably some advantages to one of the other possibilities. However, I don't think it is necessarily a good idea to throw out what you have now in order to switch.

It provides easy administration.

It minimizes our administration for the market.

I would like to see, probably a little bit tighter Type B integration.

The product is really stable.

It is very scalable.

The technical support team is very responsive.

Actually, it was just that, at that time, we decided to invest in this solution. We were still using the HPE ConvergedSystem.

The setup was very complex, but it wasn't always complex. We had some issues at the micro-level, but they resolved all of that.

We were still using the HPE equipment before the ConvergedSystem.

The stability and support are important factors while selecting a vendor.

I would actually look at the support model for HPE in the newer versions.

Its simplicity is the most valuable feature.

It is easier to manage and has one central location.

For a code upgrade, there should be more stability in the code.

To be honest, we've been having some issues with the stability of the product. We're working with the support to get it more stabilized. We did a code upgrade and the whole thing just fell. Our guys back home are still working on fixing it.

We're still in the beginning phases of using it, so I don't know how it's going to scale out or not.

The technical support team is okay. They didn't fix the problem at the first time they connected with us, so we're not too impressed, at the moment with them.

This tool was recommended to us by our partners. We then had it included with the service that we bought and implemented it.

Reliability is the most important criteria while selecting a vendor.

Try a PLC first.

The visibility of the status of the IT infrastructure.

The improvement was basically to be more efficient and have a lot of productivity. We are more developed to creation rather than just solving problems.

The possibility to do more analytics regarding the status of the assets.

To improve our political mission process and workflow.

It is very stable.

We can grow according to the needs of the IT and OT requirements.

We needed some support from HPE in Mexico, I think. I would give them a rating of 9/10.

I was not involved in the setup. The management was involved in the setup.

We checked with IBM a little bit. We went back to HPE because most of our infrastructure is HPE service and also cloud solution

It's quite important to improve IT operations to reduce the time IT people devote to solve problems. Instead, we can create valuable position innovation ideas to improve the business.

I have heard of what the benefits are supposed to be and we're trying to get to that state, but we're just not there yet.

Before OneView, for us, we were trying to manage all the separate enclosures with the Virtual Connect tools and it was cumbersome. To be honest, it was never done because it was so cumbersome. So, hopefully, OneView is going to resolve that issue, however, it just hasn't yet for us.

We are just now starting to bring it up, it has taken us around eight weeks and we haven't still been successful to bring it up. We have hardware or blades that can't see themselves within the enclosure of OneView managing them.

Hopefully, it's just going to be more stable and we can get functional, i.e., get up and running quicker than what we've seen.

The product is not stable.

We have used technical support, I would give them a 5/10 rating.

We would like to see quicker times for a resolution. It seems like when you get on the call, the technical support you have is this one level tier, who ask for a bunch of data logs and then, you get to the other technical guys who ask for the same information. You go on with this continual loop for weeks on end.

Previously, we were not using any other solution; it was just managing the virtual connecting individually. We really didn't have a choice in selecting a particular product as such, that was just the direction in which the organization was going.

We looked at CISCO's DCS platform, but we're an HPE shop and there was no major direction to change.

The hardware's reliability and manageability are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

Just make sure you put it through the paces. Again, I don't know what failed in our deployment. I've talked to some of the escalation engineers at the conference and hopefully, they're going to come back and resolve the issue. But, our IT is lean. We don't have time to be beta testers for new products, we need a product that's going to be stable out of the get-go.

The centralized management of the HPE Virtual Connect (VC) is the most valuable feature.

Just having a centralized view, instead of having to go to each chassis for managing Virtual Connect is very helpful; I got it all in one place.

It tends to detect flood conditions on a lot of the networks. I'll have blades that are suddenly offline because it detected a flood condition on that particular NIC. I've called support on that and they're like, "Yeah, we have detected a flood condition, it is a loop." However, I tell them, "We don't have a loop." So, you reset it and reboot the blade; the ESX comes back up and away you go. That has happened to me three or four times now. So, hopefully, we can figure out what's causing this at some point in time.

It has been stable, I haven't had any problems with it at all.

We have six HPE c7000 chassis, across two data centers and everything is good. We have a single OneView product in each location.

I have used technical support. It has been probably a year, but I have used them. They are excellent.

Previously, we were just managing the blades directly through the HPE Onboard Administrator (OA) and Virtual Connect (VC). We were building up brand new data centers, with brand new equipment and we had the choice of doing it the old way, or using OneView; we could just have two places to see it, i.e., one on each data center. So, we decided to combine it, this was a suggestion by one of the partners.

Stability and support are the most important criteria while looking for a vendor.

The setup was straightforward; it was pretty easy. It's a pretty simple setup; you just install your server. It's a virtual appliance and you throw it on there, start it up, add your chassis and away you go.

If you are experienced with OA and Virtual Connect, that it's a completely different animal when you're in OneView; the interface isn't the same. Finally, you figure out how OneView works. It could be that you, maybe, have never used a chassis before and then, finally, you understand this Virtual Connect beast and how to set everything up. Then, you're like, "Let's get OneView!" and you switch to OneView. The theories behind it are the same, but the interface is different and the way you set it up is different. So, I will advise being aware of going in.

What we were looking at originally with OneView was the server profiles. We were looking for:

• Something that could provision the server end-to-end with everything configured
• Core management
• Central management
• A way to manage everything
• Have a single plane of glass across all of the server platforms

Those were biggest things that were compelling and drew us to implement OneView.

Central management: That's something we're brand new to at CIBC, i.e., the bank. We never really had a centralized view. We had a very fragmented firmware process across the board with a lot of our hardware. During our refresh cycle, or when trying to keep everything current, that was when we had a real struggle. That's where OneView came into play.

We're still pretty junior into it, so right now our focus with regards to hardware is kind of being displaced now with the cloud. For future releases, it's probably not going to fall into our lap anymore. I probably can't really speak to what we would like to see in future releases, at least not at this point. As much as we've used OneView right now, it's probably not something that we're going to move forward with as a bigger footprint. We're trying to displace ourselves from the hardware platform.

Stability's good. It's an appliance, so really you plug it in and it's configured as it is. There is an advantage to the appliances, as we just put it in. We used a VM appliance and that was a pretty easy implementation. We just had to give it a compute and everything else was done for us.

Scalability is good. Right now, we're still at a small footprint. We are expanding over to another side of the bank that is also using OneView, so we're sharing the licenses. But we found that there were options. We sort of designed it so that we could scale out. We are making a central point server with a bunch of OneView nodes, so that we can still talk about everything at one central source, instead of being continually fragmented.

I did not use technical support. Right now, we are still engaged with professional services, so we had the support right on-site.

We knew we needed to invest just because of the fragmentation issue. We noticed that every time there was an incident or occurrence, it was firmware related. Generally, when you open an incident ticket with any hardware vendor, that's usually the first question, as well as any of the stability issues behind it.

We wanted to make sure that we could rule that out on a currency, on a release schedule, so we could say, "Yep. Because the servers are having scope, we're going to release it on this schedule. Once a year, twice a year, whatever it is." We didn't have a platform existing at that time to do that for us, and that's when we looked at OneView.

I was involved in the initial design. So a few things we generally look at from the engineering space are:

• How do we scale?
• How do we manage this?
• How do we manage the currency?
• How do we expand on it if we need to change the footprint and change direction?
• Can we do this easily, or is this a tear down or rebuild?

We didn't evaluate other options for this space. OneView is kind of the direction given by HPE, and we were using HPE servers. We didn't really have any necessity to look at other vendors.

I would definitely consider it for a colleague who had the same challenges as we did. Obviously, different companies have different challenges. But if they are dealing with similar challenges with regards to a fragmented footprint and currency-wise, OneView is a nice choice. It is:

• Visually appealing
• Easy to use
• Easy for managing servers going forward
• Easy for building servers at a profile level, versus going in traditionally and configuring all that stuff. It can automate all that stuff.

So if those were the challenges they are having, I would say OneView is a good place for them to look.

When selecting a vendor, I think relationship is very important. We want to make sure that our vendor is as intimate with us as we are with them. For them to understand our needs, we need to know what they can offer so that they can be transparent on what they can offer or provide partners that could offer the service to help everything we need efficiently. So that's really number one for me.

It's a little bit of unfair analysis. We weren't able to take this solution to the max. We put it in. We did a small footprint. It worked very well. But could I tell you what would happen at 3,000 servers or 5,000 servers? I wouldn't have an answer for you on that one. There is probably the potential, but I don't have an answer.

The single-pane-of-glass and a full view of the environment are the most valuable features.

The single-pane-of-glass, easy to manage, to be able to see the issues/capacities, basic metrics are important features.

I know they're building more product availability within the HPE OneView, so a wider range of products are to be viewable, i.e., you will be able to see within OneView.

I haven't seen many issues with it running in the environments. We run it personal here and run it within our environment as well, but I don't deal with it day in and day out.

We're partners, so we get to see the products, test them, and eventually, promote them. That's really how we work.

I am a vendor, so I get selected; but obviously, knowledge of a product, certifications, partnerships and their levels, etc. are important criteria while selecting a vendor.

I would recommend it. Put a demonstration in, let it show you exactly how it is supposed to work, how it benefits your company; this should convince you that this is what you need.

OneView is the software stack that is running on top of Synergy and on top of the HPE Hyper Converged 380 solution. Customers who buy separate servers can install it, and all the various elements, themselves.

OneView is the one tool where you can manage your build environment, the hyper-converged environment, or the Synergy environment yourself.

The user experience makes it easier for the administrator because new, not so new, and old environments will be managed in the same way. There is an efficiency thing as well because you don't have to be an expert in hybrid IT (private cloud and public cloud). It's the same interface for all of them.

I’d like to see more functionality going towards the hybrid IT. It is cloud economics in which we will see more and more of the private cloud and their own data centers as well.

The connection with Azure Stack, which was recently announced, demonstrates the connection between the local data center and Microsoft Azure. I see more and more features that will come together.

Can't be easier: eploy the OVA file, boot the appliance and enter the IP address and password... That's it!

I have experience with Versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. I have seen the evolution. Version 3.0 is a major step forward. Of course, Versions 4.0 and 5.0 will be better as well. That's the way it works in software.

I've been in IT a long time, so I realize that by attending conferences, such as a recent one, it’s not just for the announcements. For me, it's more of a networking thing, shaking hands, and getting to know people. At these events, you can meet the developers and the product managers. It opens up doors so you can become more independent of that one phone number. It’s quite important knowing people.

If you do the networking, you feel that the service you get is top notch. You get even more service. It makes it easier to get to the second and third line of support because you know what you're talking about. You get more information than just the marketing fluff. I know what it's about because I'm able to communicate directly with the hardware and software guys and the product managers.

One of my things I do in my company is publish a technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have. OneView is a simple installation. My nine-year-old daughter can do it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, “we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it. I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

You know all the good stuff and the not so good stuff about software, but OneView 3.0 is there now.

It enables you to view the entire infrastructure. If you have blades, storage, or any HPE environment, it enables you to manage it in a single pane. That's the best. It is easy to manage.

Although the product is meant only for HPE, it would be great if they were to incorporate functionality from non-HPE components.

It is very stable. There is no downtime.

It's been there for ages now. Every new iteration that comes in is stable. There are no issues with it.

Scalability is good.

When you log a case, technical support works quite well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. That was taken care of by the services team, but it is fairly straightforward.

We did not actually decide to buy the product. When you buy an HPE kit, HPE OneView comes with it. That’s how we got started with that.

I’m at a system integration company, so we work with HPE. We are partners with them. The ease of doing business with the company is the number one criteria when you select a vendor. The technical capability to solve a particular issue is also important, of course. This is followed by value for your money in terms of how much you spend on the infrastructure.

It's a product with which you can automate, manage, and monitor your devices.

It improves our productivity, because we can use OneView for more than just servers. We can use it for storage on some of the networks as well. So it's quite good.

With every new version, new devices are supported in OneView, but we are still missing support for some HPE products. I hope they will be supported soon.

It's quite stable. There’s been no down time.

It's easy to scale, but we are not a huge company. We're not GE.

We haven't been using technical support. We have not had any issues.

We were using Insight Manager, which was the product before OneView's conception. Therefore, we heard about OneView, and started using it instead.

Initial setup was quite straightforward.

We were not really looking at other vendors, because OneView is for HPE products. You couldn't use another product. We want OneView because we want to automate things and to manage our systems easier.

It should be easy to use and easy to manage things. You don't need a couple of different products to manage. Now you can use OneView for everything.

It provides a good view of the whole infrastructure. It makes it easy to manage the infrastructure, including the server infrastructure and firmware updates.

It keeps our costs down and improves the time it takes to manage our infrastructure and deploy.

We have different operations teams managing the servers. It should be segregated more in terms of which operation team is managing which group of servers.

I never faced any stability issues.

It is easier and faster to integrate a new BladeSystem, new servers, and a new chassis into an existing HPE OneView instance.

We have a good relationship with HPE. It is not really with technical support, but more with presales for defining the cost of features and services.

Previously, we managed the servers manually.

I was involved with the initial setup with the engineering and the operations team. It was quite easy.

I would advise colleagues to look into using this solution. Now we know that HPE OneView is the future and an important the layer of synergy management; so we need to use it right now.

When we evaluate vendors, we want a good explanation of the product and a good understanding of how the support will be. A good relationship with the vendor is important, as well as a lower price. Even if we know that this product is technically the best, the manager won’t want to select it if it is more expensive than others.

The most important feature of the latest OneView version 3 is to include the option to make calls directly to HPE.

The previous software HPE Insight Remote was old and complicated; it didn't work. When I told the system to discover my servers, it found some systems but others were completely ignored. In the newer version of OneView, I hope and pray that this feature works better. At a recent HPE conference, I saw the live demo that showed me the options. When this software works like what I saw in the demo, it will be a great feature for the new options, to get one software for all that stuff.

The centralized management and monitoring features are most valuable in this solution.

We also use OneView for monitoring all our iLOs to see in one place that all of our servers are fine.

The blade enclosure management for zoning is another benefit.

They need to add some other storage systems like MSA or P2000. That would be a great feature. At this time, they are only planning to add 3PAR. All of the others are third-party. 

I have not given it a perfect rating because some features are missing like adding other storage systems and providing email notifications.

I have used this product for two years. I worked with version 1.16 and updated to the latest version.

It is really stable. In two years, I have had only one crash and it was my fault. However, we use it for really small options. We don't use it like other companies do, i.e., for zoning, server profiles, patch management, etc. We use it only for the small things such as monitoring purposes.

Currently, we have only 33 servers but we are looking to expand.

The initial setup was very easy.

There were no other vendors on our list besides HPE.

OneView is a really good option and it makes our life easy. In other words, you can shop around but this is a good thing. 

I'm really happy with the tool. It's a great thing.

It provides a centralized management system for storage, switches and servers and helps to monitor all of this equipment. All of this is possible with one tool. Mostly, we have products and the ability to have one dashboard is very efficient for us.

It's time saving and in turn cost saving, so that is good for me and my company.

It needs to support more types of equipment. Some types of equipment we have are not supported with OneView, so we cannot monitor those on OneView. For example, the HPE 6125 Switch Series are not supported and we would like to see that resolved soon.

It's very stable.

It is scalable. When we add any equipment in OneView, it holds on without any problems.

We have used technical support and it is very good.

Prior to this product, we used dashboards, i.e., a separate dashboard for each type of equipment. For example, one dashboard for switches, another one for the servers and one dashboard for storage. It was complicated. Now we have one login and one password for all; it is good.

The setup of the product was very easy. We installed it very quickly. The function to discover equipment on the network showed up automatically in the dashboard. It was very quick; took us around an hour.

We did look at other vendors namely Dell, since we had other Dell dashboards.

The reason we chose HPE was to have two different vendors for security considerations. We wanted to have separate vendors within the security space. We want a good mix from different vendors with different architecture.

You should test it.

Some types of equipment are not supported and there is need for improvement.

You can deploy a server faster. Another benefit is easy management as compared to other solutions that we have used. There is no other solution you can use if you have HPE hardware, since you need the tooling feature.

It take us less time to deploy more servers. That's what tooling does.

I would advise them to improve their support by treating it like software. Now they are treating it as hardware.

The support team needs to change their mindset. There is a need to take the time with your customer. Perhaps carry out a room session and let that explain what the problem is. HPE needs to invest more as the level of support in India needs to be higher in terms of OneView knowledge. The HPE support team is smart but the issue is that they don't have enough knowledge of that product.

It's stable. The real pain is in support.

The product is scalable.

The technical support is terrible. They don't know what to do if you have an error; they cannot solve it. They tell you incorrect things and don't listen to the customer. They want to see log files instead of carrying out a room session to see what the problem is.

There was no other solution prior to this one. We felt that we needed OneView because it could do more in less time and in an easier way. We have accomplished that and there is no problem there.

I was involved in the setup process. It was easy and straightforward. There was really no problem with the tool, only with support.

You should use the product but not the support. That's really painful.

The roadmap of the product looks fine and we are pleased with it.

The most valuable features of the product are health control, keeping an eye on the status of the server and the repository management for firmware.

I can download the SPP from HP and upload it to OneView. After that, I can add servers to that SPP and choose to deploy it to the servers. OneView 3.0 gives us the control of the health on our servers, it reports it directly to HPE with fault, and also gives me a fast message when something happens. In 3.0, the errors messages are better explained.

Insight Remote Support that came with 3.0 automatic reports faults to HPE, and I get reference a number back from them. In an hour or less, I get called or contacted by HPE. This information is also added to the support portal, there I also have all my servers added.Then, I can write a message on the case from the Portal, and also read what HPE is doing.

Firmware - In 3.0, HPE has done a better job with firmware updates, added more features, and also enabled the possibility to stage updates on the iLO card. Now you can create a template and add a server instead of one profile for each server. This helps when changing settings to an FKS VMware template or Hyper-V template. When I upload I spp to OneView, I can now have more than two spp uploaded, this gives me the possibility to downgrade to older spp if I have issues, and also have control of what spp and firmware are installed on servers.

It provides a better control of what is installed on each server. Now, we have control over the hardware status and what is happening on the hardware in regards to hardware failures and other alarms

In the new version, we're going to get warranty status and automatic failure reports to HPE. These benefits we are going to use for sure.

I would like to choose what I want monitored from the server. I want to disable features like performance monitoring, utilization, and power control. They could add more customization of the SPPs in the system, so I can upload the SPP but then select what I want or don't want in the SPP after I've uploaded it into the system.

Another area of improvement could be in the report functionality by providing more customization so that I can create customized reports since I like to use the ones besides what HPE wants me to show.

We have had different stability issues. We have experienced a lot of downtime on it. We have used this product from the first version up until what is available right now and have noticed that a lot of the functions have stopped working suddenly with no reason. This was now in version 2.0.7. Then we maxed out the amount of alarms and after that the system crashed. However, HPE has cleaned this out.

For the last four weeks or so, we have had no issues. We still have version 2.7 but we are planning to upgrade to version 3.0.

In the earlier versions, scalability was not that good but it has improved in the newer versions. The appliance is designed more for bigger environments and the whole GUI is faster than the old ones.

The technical support is okay. It's better when I come to the second level; the first level isn't so good. They should know more about how OneView works and not just read out the standard stuff and rules from a paper because no customer is the same. In addition, when I call them, I have downloaded my part of the analysis and I just need help to find out how to fix the error.

We have used HPE before, i.e., the old system. We have had HPE from G4-G9

We have stated to use HPE Blade systems C7000.

I was involved in the setup process. When we started the process, it was easy to install. It worked right after we opened some firewall ports; everything worked okay. It was okay in regards to service and management; nothing difficult about that.

I implemented oneview my self, but had some help from HPE.

You should start small in size . Initially, start with 5-10 servers and have that running for a couple of months to see how it works. After which you can deploy it on everything else. In other words, start small, work it out and then get bigger.

Oneview

From my previous experience with stability, the system needs to prove that it is stable now and that the functions are working better than the earlier versions.

This product is for management purposes and it provides reporting and dashboard functionalities. It provides me with visibility to take the right decisions for our infrastructure.

It consolidates all of the hardware in the data centers in one view.

There are three things that I would like to see be improved. The first is related to OneView: It should support HPE MSA storage since it is not available right now. The second one is in regards to integration with the applications, which is not available currently. The third one is integration with some security devices, which is not available in the current version.

The stability of this product is good.

There are still some limitations in OneView, as it manages only the hardware and not the applications.

I have used technical support and it is good.

We were not using any other solution prior to this one.

I was involved in the initial setup process. It was quite straightforward.

You only need to look at this product because it is good.

The most important criteria while choosing a vendor is in regards to their commitment of delivering a complete project and not part of the project. Thus, there is need to give end-to-end commitment for complete project delivery.

The most valuable feature is the capability it provides to implement automation and write automation scripts. This is what the world is going after.

We deliver faster now.

Sometimes it gets slow, so it doesn’t always perform well. I think it's a work in progress.

Every product has it's bugs, but they are getting fixed.

Technical support was very useful. For me, when you are choosing a product, good technical support is a must.

We were using HPE SIM. That's fairly buggy. It's okay for monitoring hardware, but it's a bit of a drama for other things.

The initial setup was straightforward, but partially complex. It was complex in previous versions because not all the online features were available, but currently I think it should be straightforward with version 3.0.

I think this is a very good solution if you want to have your compliance up-to-date, directly available, and you want to automate.

The most valuable feature is that we use it for monitoring the HPE system hardware.

We have a partnership with HPE. We have a monitoring product and have integrated with HPE OneView. So, we use the HPE OneView functionality for monitoring all the system hardware.

It has improved the working of our organization because with HPE OneView, we have one system integrated with our system. It monitors and manages all the HPE software and hardware systems.

Thus, by a simple integration with HPE OneView, we can demand work from HPE software and monitor  all the systems of our customers.

Managing the system is the next step for us. Currently, we have realized the integration and use the monitoring feature of this product. The next step for us is to explore and propose the managing of the systems. Thus, we need to be more experienced in this part of the software.

Probably one of the missing features is a help tool of the system from our point of view, that can be given to the customer and to us. For example, it can help with the release of a firmware upgrade or a comparison with the system that has the versions of the firmware installed on the system and is available on the HPE side. Also, it should provide a comparison of my firmware version's situation in relation to the new upgrade that is available.

It's stable. For us, it's the first step of integration as we are young. 

The restful APIs were very useful and helped us to integrate easily with the solution.

The product is scalable.

Right now, it is difficult for me to answer this since we are very young with this integration. It is also a starting point to make decisions and to decide the future way.

The initial setup was very easy because you can download the appliances on your virtual machine. It is a sort of auto-setup, you can plug into one world and setup is very easy. The configuration was very easy. Since we are technicians for us, it has been easy to install and configure the system.

We have partnered up with HPE. We are historical partners, so HPE proposed to us to integrate OneView because they knew that we sell a monitoring solution. We were told that we would get a good integration with our monitoring system.

It's a very good product, but I don't have enough experience to say that it is perfect.
In other words, there's a lot of experience needed and we are not able to maximize all the features in the product until we learn more from it.

We chose OneView when we decided to do a technology refresh on our data center. At that point we were buying over 40 HPE enclosures and 500 blades and we really wanted some kind of automation technology to help us manage and deploy that infrastructure at speed. We're a kind of company that does things fairly quickly with short notice.

We expected that we would need to deploy the new equipment fairly quickly andthere was a lot of pressure to get stuff done as soon as the decision was made to purchase. OneView allowed us to accelerate the base configuration far faster and more accurately than ever before with manual configuration procedures.

When we came a year later to extending the infrastructure having OneView allowed us to quickly extend with the same configuration deployed in hours rather than days.

OneView has allowed us to standardize a lot. Prior to that, everything was done on a individual basis. So we now have standard templates for our servers and partially automated deployments. The configuration quality of new infrastructure has been a problem in the past.

Also, we benefit from improved monitoring,compliance and updates. That whole tool set has come together into OneView. We're a small team of six managing a large environment and it's probably saved around a person's time every two weeks; a day a week or half-day a week of their time just in trolling through things looking for logs and such.

At a recent conference, I spoke to the guys in the CDA booth about what's coming and there's quite a few features in there already that I was looking for. I've asked for some better facilities around the management of alerts. The system currently has 75,000 alerts that are either being acknowledged or some are active, and there's not a simple way of selecting a whole filtered list and then closing them off and deleting them. So one of my bits of feedback already to the development guys is around alert management.

Also, I've spoken to them about some more role-based access control for the new Oneview global dashboard tool that was recently launched. We could do it in OneView itself, that's capable of doing role-based control to some extent, but it’s quite minimum in the dashboard tool. It only provides basic functions like administrate, modify, and read only. We'd like to see that broadened and then I'd like to see that pushed up into the OneView dashboard, but I believe in recent versions of Oneview this is also being improved with resource scopes .

Since 2014.

No.

The product is really pretty stable now, pretty good. We've had minor issues, so if I were going to rate it either a 4/5 or 5/5, I'd go for a 4/5. We've had some bugs in terms of things not quite working when we've done upgrades. But we've had good support from HPE.

Scalability wise, it meets our companies needs. We were very close to the initial limits of the product when it first came out. Those limits have been raised now, but we've not grown into that arena, so we're okay.

We have used technical support extensively. We have escalated some issues back to developers and had been supported that way as well when the issues have gone beyond the basic kind of issues. I would rate support itself 4/5. Cool handling and just getting to the level of where you need to be, probably a 3/5. I think that's really because we tend to do a lot of triage ourselves. We've got guys that are not ones to pick up the phone straight away to call technical support. So we need to push them into that and to use technical support more. Technical supports always gets us there, but it takes time.

I was using all the standard HPE tools that come as standard with the infrastructure itself, such as the built in Onboard Administrator, Virtual Connect Manager and Service pack for Proliant. The scale of the refresh we were doing and the time frame we were trying to do it in led us to OneView. It allowed us to merge all these seperate point management solutions into the one tool for managing and updating the hardware/firmware.

Initial setup was very straightforward. OneView is a very straightforward piece of software to use. I would rate 'ease of use' very highly.

In house.

I would advise others to be sure about what you want to get out of the tool and that you understand its limitations. Definitely go through a demonstration yourself. It's very hard to bring a crosswalk, what's its capable of in just documentation and the like.

I think ease of use is the most valuable feature. It saves us a huge amount of time. Normally, when we go and add a VLAN, we have to do it in a per-enclosure and per-blade basis. But when we use OneView, we can create one trunk and we can push it to all of the blades and the enclosures, and that saves us a huge amount of time.

Having one pane of glass is another benefit. We’ve got an entire blade system from one pane of glass. We’re able to see any alerts or any issues from there.

It has just saved us a huge amount of time, which lets us look at other things, more productive things.

There is room for improvement, especially with the speed of things. If we push a profile out, it takes several minutes; if we could improve the speed of pushing out a profile.

I think we want to get a 3PAR integrated with OneView and see what we can do with that. That's our next target.

We haven't had any issues with it. We have only had it for a few months now, but we haven't had any issues. It works fine.

I think the only problem we have is when we move an enclosure we've already got that hasn't got OneView. That takes a bit of planning. We have to empty that enclosure and then add it in. There is a bit of work to do, but anything new goes straight in. It's not a problem.

Rather than just import it into OneView – apparently it loses all the settings that we've got – we'll empty that enclosure, pop the blades into another enclosure, and then import that into OneView. Then, we move everything back after we've done that.

I don't think we have used technical support for OneView.

Before OneView, we would just log on to the onboard administrator (OA) and the virtual connects (VCs) directly.

I think we only looked at OneView. We knew what we wanted to do.

The most important criteria to me when choosing a vendor and a product are customer references, how have other people have found it. Price is always an important one as well.

I'm not sure what the other competitors are out there, to be perfectly honest. It works fine for us. As I’ve mentioned, it saves us a huge amount of time whenever we are setting up new systems. I recommend it for infrastructure monitoring.

We're using OneView, which actually lets me control both 3PAR and our BladeSystems from one platform instead of having to jump back and forth between different management.

It improves everything we had, because everything we had was so old that dinosaurs would have been ashamed of using it. We were actually using an eleven year old IBM blade sever.

There are some portions of OneView that don't work with 3PAR, well actually it's parts of 3PAR that don't work with OneView. They're working on them now, so I already know it's in the road map. I can't say it's something that needs to be improved when they're already working on them.

It's extremely stable. The 3PAR has been rock solid since we put it in. The blades have been a godsend, they're like five hundred times better than the ones that they were using before we transferred over.

Scalability is perfect. If I need to, I can add another couple blades or I can add more to it. I still have about half my 3PAR nodes are open, so I can keep adding storage as I need it.

The only time we've used tech support was when we were setting it up, and there was an issue with the config file for the 3PAR. It was resolved within twenty minutes of actually getting a phone call through.

Service for HP has always been extremely good, and I've never had too many problems where I actually had to call service. It's usually just little things, like I had a keyboard key fall off, and one of my people actually called for that. That was about the worst thing that's happened with HP with me in about the last ten years.

I've been using HP ever since I can remember. They were actually some of the first computers that we had in the military when they started going over to computers, and I've been using them ever since. I wasn't, but one of our developers pushed forward Dell and they kind of blew up. Their quotes were outrageous compared to what it was from HP.

It was extremely straightforward and easy. Wasn't all that much because we were using the OneView, all I had to do was set up one blade, and then all the rest of the blades match, so I can just copy that profile off onto the others.

We were also looking at EMC but for what they want money, finance, and everything else for it, is probably about 45% more than what I paid for the same system through 3PAR, and the 3PAR can do more than EMC solution could do. It's not hard for me to use file persona. It was just get the licenses, set it up, and run.

Actually do the research, and not just try and run off of somebody at a blog, writing something. There's a lot more if you actually go into the research on the different products, what is actually really worth it and what isn't. A lot of stuff from EMC is expensive. It's more expensive than it needs to be going through HP.

It enables us to capture any physical server alerts when there's any issue with health or change in connectivity status of the servers.

It catches physical issues with the servers and will fix them, if possible, and, if not, alert us before they become a problem. This saves us the headache and expense of coming in after the damage has already been done.

I'd like to know where the product is going, whether it's converging with another, whether they're going to shut it down, etc. It would just be nice to know because there have been about three different versions of it and it's a bit unnerving not knowing the product's future.

We are just about to deploy it.

It's definitely a stable product.

I think it can be used extensively throughout our estate. The only thing with this is that I'm finding out a new product is about to be deployed when I've just bought what I thought was the newest version. We want to go with the latest version, but it would be nice to know what's ahead.

Technical support has been very good with deployment.

The initial setup has been straightforward enough, which is good.

We contacted them from our account manager and we got the information we required for implementation.

This is free. That always helps.

Go for the latest version. Test it out for free, and you should be okay.

• Automation
• Simplicity of use
• Time saving
• Structured
• Balanced network application

For a company like ours, we need to make sure that all of our data and customers are protected. OneView allows us to do that by reducing our stress and time.

For future releases of OneView, I would say, let me control my cloud. Let me do stuff from the command line myself. I would love to be able to do simple things from my end with a bit of space to adjust my preferences for myself. Perhaps open the command line for Windows and let me work with it.

It is stable if you are able to understand how it works. You can’t pretend to come to this new style of IT and have it work the way you did with old technologies. If you can make sure that you understand the workarounds for your challenges, then OneView is very stable.

As long as you’re running OneView on your private cloud and you have control of it, it's scalable.

I don’t like HP support very much, as they tend to transfer me to random places that don’t help me very much.

I used to have a consulting company using open source software for healthcare for small businesses. I wanted to ensure that security was paramount in my business. After I did a risk analysis for a company, I recommended that they move to a private cloud, which was a huge project for a small company like theirs.

HP was their vendor, and they helped them move towards the solution they needed. OneView came out then, and so I checked out HP’s product line for my needs at the time as well.

It’s very straightforward but, unfortunately, not very user friendly. When you’re dealing with private infrastructure, it will always take time to implement from the get-go.

First, that it’s simple. It saves me time and is easy to use. It releases stress for me, and since I’m working with federal law, I really need to make sure that all of my customers and their data are protected properly.

Go to the field and see what the clients are going through. Don’t just use case studies; check for the real stuff. What are others struggling with, and why is that important, and will this affect us? Make sure that vendors can solve real-life scenarios because that’s what you’re struggling with as well.