HPE ProLiant DL Servers Reviews

We are a solution provider and the ProLiant DL Servers are one of the products that we implement for our customers. They are primarily used as domain controllers and file servers. One of our customers also uses them for Nutanix.

The most valuable feature is stability.

The price of this solution should be lowered to make it more competitive.

We have been working with the HPE ProLiant DL Servers for about two years.

These servers are stable and we plan to continue working with them.

This is a scalable product.

We are satisfied with the technical support from HPE.

The initial setup is straightforward and they take between a day and two days to deploy.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment. One person is enough for deployment and maintenance.

This is an expensive product and there is licensing required for iLO, which is the HPE monitoring system. There are no charges in addition to this.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

One of our customers wants some on-premises rack servers and AD servers. I suggested buying an HPE server and doing virtualization on that. We are considering HPE ProLiant Gen9 Servers.

The feature that I find the most valuable is that all alerts are integrated with HPE InfoSight. Any problem related to an HPE server can be solved remotely at L1, L2 level.

They can increase the controller cache. Currently, it has a controller cache of up to 4 GB. The RAID controller card comes with a maximum of 4 GB cache in HPE servers, whereas it comes with a maximum of 8 GB cache in Dell servers. 

They can also improve the port size. HP provides a 25 GB port on the server, whereas both Dell and Cisco provide a 100 GB port. 

I have been using this solution for five to ten years.

It is stable.

Scalability depends upon the solution we are proposing.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took a maximum of one and a half hours. The deployment duration also depends upon the operating system.

I would recommend this solution. HPE servers are better than Dell and Wipro servers. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use HPE Proliant DL Servers as rack servers.  

There were a number of incidents, but overall it is stable. I think that we had a problem with a drive bay. Once we replaced the drive bays, everything is now working fine now.  

Surely it is possible to scale the product. If you want to pay to upgrade the hardware like the processor and RAM cards it can be scaled.  

We try to support the local suppliers most of the time and so we are working with them instead. We do not have a direct agreement for technical support with the team at HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise).  

I can recommend HPE Proliant DL Servers to other users.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as an eight-out-of-ten. To make it ten-of-ten, would be two things. First, when they make a sale they should provide support for the product to the buyer. I think they also need to make the hardware as relevant as possible as it is not completely up-to-date. For example, the drive bays generally seem to need to be upgraded.  

My primary use of this solution is for mathematical models that we develop and buy. The mathematical models are being bought from companies like Siemens, General Electric, SMS, and DMAC Group. Primarily these companies give us this software, we buy it from them, they make mathematical models for steel plants and we also make our own models.  

I also have around 40 portals that I'm running on that I had developed and maintained. I use the DL servers to host the databases and the portal.

We make steel and the manufacturing also requires software. These servers are the ones that we prefer. Since the beginning, we were tied with HPE and I have an annual maintenance contract for all of my servers. I have around 3,000 computers, 800 are servers including Alphas, from HPE. I have very few Dell EMC servers. I don't prefer Dell EMC primarily because the availability of the service engineer is not like HPE. It's not weird that Dell or IBM servers are not as good as HPE. Because I have the facility, the advantage of HPE is that they have been here since the beginning and so I prefer HPE. Since it's distributed across India, a very large area of almost 30 other square kilometers, I cannot house every one of them in one common platform. All of my Oracle lower databases or HPE server databases and all of the software I've accepted all the Alphas and even I use Windows platform operating systems. These particular servers have served very well.

Stability and a lower failure rate are the most valuable features.

I would like to see more of a hard drive base.

IT keeps on changing the versions of their products. There have historically been great differences in time than when the G server, the Gen8, nine, and now 10 generations of DL ProLiant server have been available, the time differences are much less. Specifically for G9, G10 even less than one year, now there is no way people like us will keep on upgrading servers without having proper ROI. HPE needs to allow us to replace the CTUs of a higher generation.

It is quite stable. They do not fail easy.

DL3 is not scalable. You cannot scale them versus replace scalable hardware, like going to Itanium servers. 

I have not needed to contact their technical support. 

We also looked at Dell EMC and IBM. The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, apart from costs, is service. Service will ensure stability. 

I would rate them eight, primarily because of the service that they provide and stability that the hardware gives.

For any other person who wants to buy any hardware, the first thing that he should look for is who is going to support him locally. He should then evaluate cases of the availability of that particular vendor's hardware. Buying any such systems is not a big task. He should see if he can maintain these servers in the long run. By long run, think ten years. He should be comfortable with the people that are going to help maintain and comfortable with the equipment that he's going to buy.

I used it for building an application, database middleware servers. It performed very well for my needs.

IT is easily manageable and expandable as well as usability for anything. especially for clustering using VMware vCenter server solution.

There is a lot of processors, I am only using half of what I need. In addition, they update the ILO to V. 5 so maintenance remains very easy. You can easily monitor everything from office needs, storage, performance, power supply, and temperature.

If they could put more disk array in one node or rebuild it in the same server, it would be very helpful and more powerful.

The stability is better with the added microSD instead of LD, so you can still install your operation into the microSD and give the other storage back.

Easy, fast and strong to scale in a different performance like disks, memory,  and power.

During our first year of using tech support, it was very good. But recently there has been a lack of help from their support team. Unless it is a special case, they are not very helpful.

Used OLD IBM, Dell, Sun and Huawei they are good but not like HPE, give you deferent feels.

Actually, there are no comlexity in the setup everything is straightforward and clear.

All my implementation are done in house one, as it is very symbol and easy to learn.

Four months approximately according to the solution that using.

My advice is to start getting the training by themselves for how to manage HP Dl servers as the setup is easy to learn then make pricing according to model number and performance last ask the cost from Gold partner of HP as partners give a good discount.

Actually, every company that worked with have preferred vendor according to what systems integrators gave to them,  in Thishknet I did the evaluation and select HP again according to performance, usability and price.

Start to use Nutanix Solution with HPE Dl Servers that recommend by Nutanix.

Virtualized servers, failover production and dev/test environments of Linux and Windows guests.

We have been able to virtualize many physical servers into virtual servers running on a smaller number of physical hosts. This has allowed us to consolidate and reduce our carbon footprint in the data center and have a higher ROI on Capex purchases. Also becomes easier to introduce new hardware as part of replacement cycles as VMs are hardware independent.

• iLO gives hardware information, preempting imminent failures.
• Redundancy features provide hot-swap ability for drives and power supplies and automatic rebuilding of RAIDs.

Boot-up time should be reduced. Restarting a server at any time is a stress-filled occasion, and waiting around for the server to come back on is agonizing. 10GB and 40GB ethernet connections are essential for virtualization workloads and consolidation.

Stability can be adversely affected if non-HP certified RAM is used, e.g. Kingston value RAM has failed a few times, bringing an entire server down.

Excellent, the support is one area where I can have no complaints. Whenever a hardware failure has been detected, HP have responded in good time and the part was delivered within the agreed SLA. Having said that, the original parts availability outside the established channels also makes it easy (cheaper) to maintain, especially in non-critical environments i.e. dev and test.

I've used HP servers predominantly so do not have much else to compare them with.

It's simple. Use the included SmartStart media, and it seamlessly integrates with the OS of choice.

In-house. I have found the rack mounting kits more of a challenge then the installation of the OS/hypervisor, that is how simple implementation is. Also, keep an eye on which version of the SmartStart media you use i.e. x86 vs. x64 as that limits what kind of OS media can be utilized.

ROI is difficult to say because it depends on the type of implementation e.g. is it a new deployment or consolidating an existing an existing one or simply replacing like for like. What I would say, is that the platforms are very stable and once setup, will most likely outlast any hardware replacement cycle in place.

Ensure that you get the hardware support with 24x7 four hour response if this is a high availability production environment, and purchase appropriate iLO licenses if needed.

The only thing I don't like about them is that if/when you have to restart it, it takes a long time to come back on. As the sea of sensors have increased in recent generations, the time has become longer.

Define your storage needs in advance and then plan the disks accordingly. Suggest that if flash storage is financially feasible, then invest in that as the performance benefits are worth it.

I am using it to virtualize VMware. It is performing well.

• Performance
• Costs

I am impressed with the SimpliVity solution. I need to look a bit about this.

It is very stable; no downtime.

This solution is very scalable. When we bought the DL580, we bought it with full capacity. It is great for our business, and if we need to scale more, we can buy a new one.

We use HPE Datacenter support, and it is good support. It is automatic support. When I have a problem, the question is written automatically.

We were previously using another blade solution. We decided to switch because this solution provides more memory density.

The initial setup was easy.

Dell, IBM, etc. They fell short on the product baseline.

It is a good product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: innovation.

There are two sets of servers that we use. We have several sites where we have VMware clusters using the servers, and also we have standalone servers that we use for physical security applications.

They are both performing very well.

We are on a journey with that. iLO, in particular, helps us manage the servers better, especially as a lot of them are remote from where the IT staff are. We have some locations where we just have not got IT presence at those locations, so iLO really helps with that. We are starting to use HPE OneView to manage them further, so that is where we are going with it. Hopefully, to go and be able to manage them.

1. Obviously, they perform what we want them to do.
2. The added extras, I particularly like iLO.
3. Just to be able to manage them and get information about the servers. That is really good.

At the moment, I feel that there is more there that we could be using rather than things that are missing.

The servers are very stable. They have been in place for about six to seven years. We are refreshing stuff. We are about to refresh a lot of the vSphere servers because they have come to their end of life. They are about five years old, so we are gonna put in some hyper-converged servers instead. 

In theory, they are expandable. So yeah, they fit our needs and I am sure if things changed, when we needed more capacity, we could get it. I am confident of that. 

Technical support is very good. I can't complain. We have had very few incidents, but when we have needed to, we can get through to them and get the right support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. Though, we are going through a new setup and I will be involved in that.

With the DL380, you can't go wrong. There is no risk to go and take them.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Trusting that you will always have the right level of service. Support is key for that, and obviously knowing that the servers are used by thousands and thousands of other people. That they will be tried and tested. It is reassuring.