HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

We use it for the 12 VMs we have on it. We are using VMware.

It's very useful.

It's easy to upgrade, and it is very easy to take care of the firmware upgrades.

With a complete bootable CD, we can do the upgrades quite remotely and pretty easily.

A black mark that we felt with HPE is that it failed within four to six months of use, even after it was addressed with HPE. 

The implementation should be simplified, it is not straightforward.

The product should be better tested before they send it to the end-user.

The stability needs improvement.

Support could be improved to be faster in responding.

We just purchased HPE ProLiant DL Servers six months ago.

We are using the latest version.

At this point in time, I would not say that it is a very stable product, because of the bad experience that we had.

It is scalable to a certain extent. Not very much, but at least 20% scalable.

We have 300 users in our organization.

We contacted technical support for the issues that we were facing. 

I found them to be quite slow in their response.

We could put up with the delay because it had just been brought in, and the applications were being transferred.

In fairness, it could have been because of the COVID issue. But I found them to be pretty slow.

Previously we were using Dell, and we switched from Dell to HPE.

We have been very dedicated users of Dell and never had any issues with them. Unfortunately, we had to switch to HPE for a specific reason.

We switched from Dell because of some specific requirements that could not be met with Dell. Also, we switched because of some financial issues. Dell was more expensive and we couldn't afford it at that time.

It wasn't straightforward.

We had some issues with some failures initially. Though it was taken care of by HPE, we still had some failures, which was surprising.

We have a team of ten admins, engineers, managers, and data entry guys to maintain and deploy this solution.

We had the help of the HPE service providers.

We have purchased this solution and it is under warranty. It is more economical than some other products.

We will continue to use this solution, as we have purchased it and can't afford to just throw it away. If we continue to have further issues, we will consider changing it over.

With my current experience, I could not recommend this product to others.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

It is mainly an x86 Intel server. There are some versions of AMD processors as well. You can use it for many purposes. You can use it as a web server, a backup server, a database server, or an application server. You can use it for any main purpose for which you need a server.

It is mainly on-premises, but you can also deploy it in a cloud.

It is very stable. This is the feedback that I'm getting from my customers for the hardware. It is also 100% scalable.

HPE is also very specialized when it comes up to the server industry. It is not only about the rack servers; it is also about the blade servers. They were the first ones to bring these to the market more than ten years ago. 

It has something called WorldView. They should do some enhancement over WorldView to run an operating system as a code. Such a feature would be amazing for running multiple servers. They are already working on this, and they can enhance the existing versions for this.

It should also be cheaper. It is currently expensive.

I have been selling this solution for almost six years.

It is very stable.

It is 100% scalable. We have about a hundred customers.

I don't directly get in touch with them, but I haven't heard anything bad about it.

The initial setup is not complicated for HPE or any other server.

It is expensive. Its price should be better.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate HPE ProLiant DL Servers an eight out of ten.

I would say it's well documented and you can find exactly what the configuration is easily as well as the drivers and other documentation that they require to get a junior staff member up and running on the platform.

It allowed us to consolidate our workloads. It allowed us to process the data more efficiently. To provide real time data for our end user applications.

I would say that for us, as we're moving to more of a cloud based solution, we're looking for ways that you can take machines that you can't put in a private cloud instance and how those can be managed from a single user interface.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't break.

This is something that we're going into right now with HP as we've built out a stack of these machines. In the future we're planning on moving to more of a cloud based architecture.

They want to add more sites and it's just not good for us to add in another rack of equipment for every site.

Technical support gets to the parts where we need it. Like any product, it fails occasionally, right? But we built the system to survive and HP is still there to support us.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

I don't know why they chose HP in the end. I think it's just experience and it was the right company at the time.

We look for experience, stability and the ability to support our customers' requirements from a security perspective. Also the availability of documentation. Documentation that can be supported by even new staff members that have never touched the system.

Work with HP to pilot before you go buy it.

Most valuable for us are ease of use, the ability to quickly view the system for health and how to get into the consols.

It reduces the amount of work that we have to do. In the old days we used to have to go downstairs and basically plug into a computer and do stuff like that. Now, we're at our desk and we just walk right up to a computer and if you know something is going on you can easily open the case with HP and have them come out and take a look at it.

I can't think of anything right now regarding improvements except perhaps the price. I think more involvement with us, the customer would be good too. They are doing better with that now though. We've had meetings with them and we really discussed the problems that we've come across. I'd say we're going in the right direction, that's for sure.

Stability is definitely encouraging. The other system was weak. We had a lot of problems with the memory. The memory would go out every time we did a patch. We'd have to reboot the server and as it came back up, 10 percent of the time, we'd have a memory issue but over the last year or two, it's been much improved.

Scalability is pretty good. I'd say it's a lot better than it used to be, definitely.

The technical support is very good. There's always somebody available. We have an on-call number.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

Mostly we look at reliability, maintenance and support. Those are the big ones to consider when choosing a vendor. Since we have a relationship with HP, that's it regarding any alternative vendors.

As I said earlier, look at their maintenance support. The number of companies that they actually support. Those are big factors. And disaster recovery. That's what I would say.

We use the solution for the DR site and run it on the infrastructure system.

The scalability of the product is the same as the Cisco solution and we have the same number of people working with it.

Technical support are mostly helpful.

The pricing is reasonable. We pay approximately 30 to 35K, which is cheap.

The product is lower quality than its competitors in terms of performance. The hardware  was frequently faulty and sometimes broke down. 

I would therefore give it an overall rating of eight out of 10.

We are using it for serving the VMware environment and creating all of our virtual servers and desktops.

The GPU units, processor speed, and capabilities are most valuable. Desktop video conferencing is also valuable. It supports desktop video conferencing much better for graphics.

They should work with Microsoft to make licensing costs better. That's because the physical servers have processors with all these cores, and Microsoft now licenses Windows virtual server desktops based on the number of cores and the serving servers. So, if you got to build 10 or 20 servers on that desktop, you got to license them all with Microsoft. They should have a partnership with Microsoft to decrease the virtual licensing of servers in partnerships so that when you purchase the servers, you also get licensing for Microsoft on top of them. That's because it gets very expensive to license virtual operating systems to run on physical servers.

I have been using this solution for 10 years, but these are refreshed. So, they're new. We have hardly used them.

It is solid. We didn't face any issues.

Its scalability is great. We have 150 users, and it is being used heavily. We are taking every bit of life out of it we can. We don't have any plans to increase its usage.

Their technical support is great. It is fantastic.

We have only used HPE.

It is easy. Getting them up and running is a piece of cake, but getting the VMware environment operation on them is very complicated.

It has been a couple of months so far, and we're still working on it.

We are implementing it in-house. We are growing that skill internally. I got a rockstar guy doing all that. I don't do it on my own. 

For its maintenance, we have one network administrator.

They need to work with Microsoft to make the licensing costs better and more efficient.

It is a good product. I would rate it a nine out of 10 because it has good support and good performance.

The main use for the last order was for the applications and other items around an electronic fencing system.

The initial setup is very easy.

The solution scales well.

The pricing of the product is fair and not too expensive.

The product is very stable.

The solution is pretty complete, for what I have seen over the past three years. I can't recall if I've felt that any features were lacking within that time.

The technical support is pretty good, however, they could be a bit faster and more responsive.

We've been using the solution for three years at this point.

The solution is quite stable. It's worked for two or three years with no downtime whatsoever. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable.

We haven't had any issues with scaling over the time we've had the solution. If a company needs to scale, it should be able to do so relatively easily.

We have about 300 users that log into the system at any given time.

We plan to increase usage. We have to extend our electronic fencing system to our other sites, and we will likely purchase another product from ProLiant when that happens.

There's another team for technical support. The technical support is very, very good and the experience in our organization has made us interested in buying more HP ProLiant. We're quite satisfied with the level of support they give to us.

While the company hasn't used a different solution, I personally have experience with Dell. I generally prefer to use HP instead.

The implementation is not complex at all. We find the initial setup to be quite straightforward.

The product was ordered and came complete and ready to go. It was basically plug and play, so that there really wasn't a deployment period per se. We just had to power it up and check the hardware. We put in the discs and had the spare parts on hand as well. They deliver it ready to go, so it's pretty fast.

We have five individuals that handle the implementation and maintenance. They are all engineers.

I don't consider it an expensive product. We're quite happy with the pricing so far. It's reasonable.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with HP.

We're using the latest version of the solution. We purchased Gen 10 about a year or so ago.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

Overall, I would rate the product at a nine out of ten.

The iLO. To me, its the differentiating factor of the ProLiant server and the biggest reason I'd choose to run them versus competitors. The iLO provides all the management features needed and is a consistent experience across all form factors, sizes and lines of ProLiant.

The Gen8 and Gen9 hardware provides agentless monitoring and management using the iLO, so we don't have to run agents and rely on software to get hardware alerts. These all come across directly from the iLO. OS level alerts still require agents, but all the basic hardware monitoring does not.

These predate my time with the company. I've been with the company for 10 years and the ProLiant were several generations older, so I would say we had original generation one DL 380s, so it probably goes back at least 15 years.

Very few in recent models. Most any issues are resolved with firmware and driver updates from the HPE Service Pack for ProLiant, their cross-tested bundles. On top of this, HPE has done a lot of address issues for administrators. A couple of generations ago, with the Gen8 ProLiant debut, they hit twenty different improvements that I care about as an administrator. Predictive memory enables us to know when memory is going to fail. Instead of having a hard failure or a crash in the middle of the night, it's got predictive memory so it lets us know when not to pull a drive. So if we're wanting to pull a drive for a fail-back point or something, it's got a little indicator that says "Don't pull me right now". It's got an "X" mark on it, so I don't crash a system just trying to do something preventative, but there was a wealth of different things that they added into the systems that I can appreciate as an operations guy.All of that stuff came directly from feedback of customers like me and got integrated into the next product cycle, so I'm a huge ProLiant fan.

No. You can scale-out with ProLiant, but each generation increases the memory and CPU capabilities exponentially, so from that perspective it's usually just a refresh cycle from scale discussion. But that is kind of how we approach it, is we need to increase capacity within inside of our VMware farms, we replace the hardware with a new generation, generally increase the amount of RAM and CPU configuration.

7/10 - it can be hit or miss. We get better luck with our premium support levels. We have a named TAM for some of our systems, that works out well. Escalation managers are always good. There is good technical talent, it's just sometimes hidden by first level support. That can be difficult and frustrating at times, but over ten years working with them, I would say today it's probably a little better than when I first started. Actually, I would say it's probably improved a good bit since I first started working with them, but it's still got some room to go.

They were dead simple. You rack them, power them on, then you can use Intelligent Provisioning to install and configure the system. They just make a lot of sense. It's easy.

I think it's the best server you can possibly buy. I have recently had more exposure to Dell and Cisco products to compare with and I stand by the DL line as the best server and it is primarily because of iLO.