HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

The most valuable feature is the clustering. To be honest, this storage isn’t a particularly a good storage, but it offers basic storage services and easy clustering. I would say that if this storage were a school kid, many other storage solutions would bully it.

It needs support for clustering different disk nodes - nodes of different sizes.

We've used it for seven months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The failover is pretty slow, especially if you are using VMware storage.

It has scaled to our needs.

8-9/10

8-9/10

This was already in the company when I joined.

It’s kind of a primitive storage with limited options, so if someone has already worked with a proper storage solution, this won’t cause any headaches during the implementation. It's an easy click-click process after you have downloaded the management tool.

We did it in-house.

You shouldn't buy it, and get HP MSA or something similar.

High Availability is the most valuable feature for us.

It allows us to provide simple High Availability SAN solutions that are scalable with both speed and storage by just adding extra nodes.

The stability isn’t as good as a traditional SAN as the nodes run an operating system and act like a storage server.

We've been using it for five years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Things like a hard power off can cause OS corruption and booting issues. This isn’t too much of an issue because of the High Availability design.

We've had no issues with the scalability. We chose this because, in part, it's easily scalable.

8/10 - HP support are quite knowledgeable when there are internal software bugs.

The initial setup is straightforward if you have SAN knowledge.

We did it in-house. Just make sure you configure and plan your failover manager correctly and all best practices are followed on the welcome status page.

Their licensing is excellent as it's included in the package. Items such as site-to-site replication, High Availability, and clustering are all included at no additional cost.

We also looked at EMC. We chose this product because of the ease of scalability and ease of support.

The StoreVirtual software provides us with a highly resilient storage platform for virtual machines.

Prior to the introduction of the StoreVirtual VSA, our four domain controllers resided on local disks in each data center (two in each site). There was no functionality for cross site migration and in the event of a data center failure, we were left without 2 DC’s for the duration of the outage. The implementation of StoreVirtual has allowed us to create cross site storage volumes, allowing VM’s to migrate freely between data centers. In the event of a data center outage, potentially all 4 domain controllers could be running from one site.

I find it rather tedious to manage. To give an example, I was upgrading one of our very first management groups from 10.5.00 to 11.5.00. The VSA VM’s were deployed from an older OVF template (which is running out of, but still in support). I contacted HP support prior to upgrading seeking advice and best practice guidance. I upgraded the LeftHand OS version to 11.5.00.

A month or so down the line, the partition OS drive on both VSA VM’s was full – causing the cluster to go into an operational, not unmanageable state (cluster was not writing any logs, was unable to do root cause analysis of issue that had occurred). The only way to clear this partition was to log a call with HP support and have a remote session to allow them to do so (they have to provide a password to access the support shell of the VM’s). The partition of these VM’s cannot be increased as it may corrupt the OS. I now have to plan upgrading both nodes in the cluster.

This solution has been implemented in our data centers for approximately four years, and I have had personal experience with this solution for two years.

Deployment is reasonably simple.

Stability can become an issue if you are planning on deploying a multi-site cluster – you need to ensure you have the appropriate links between each data center to allow the storage to replicate.

I have deployed StoreVirtual in single data centers and have not encountered any stability issues. Scalability is also reasonably simple.

On a whole HP Technical Support is very good. Staff have great knowledge of the product which you would expect. However, as I said previously, they failed to warn me about upgrading older versions of the VM’s.

StoreVirtual was chosen by our Head of Infrastructure as he wanted a product that provided highly resilient storage replication with our IBM hardware. StoreVirtual is a good product if you are a non-HP customer, however if you use HP hardware I would recommend using Peer-Persistence, essentially a hardware VSA rather than the software based product – it is much more reliable. We are moving to two new data center 4th quarter of 2016 and we will be using HP hardware (3PAR) and Peer-Persistence and StoreVirtual will be decommissioned.

The initial setup is reasonably straightforward, I have deployed it in a number of remote sites. I was not involved in the initial setup in our data centers as I had not joined the organization at the time.

StoreVirtual was already in place before I joined, but it was implemented in house with the assistance of an HP engineer who provided best practice guidelines.

Our return is a highly resilient storage platform that allows us to place all our tier one services on, i.e. domain controllers, DNS, exchange hubs, etc.

Your licensing will depend on your scalability, licenses are available in 4TB, 10TB, 20TB and 50TB. Licenses are assigned by MAC address of the NICs on the VSA VM’s

It would depend on who your hardware vendor is. As I stated, if you are an HP customer I would recommend using their hardware VSA Peer-Persistence, but if you are a non-HP customer then StoreVirtual is a reasonably good product.

It is an affordable alternative to hardware SAN and is seamlessly compatible with our vSphere 5.5 hosts which are sitting on HP Proliant hardware. The 'valuable' feature is in essence the product itself - virtual storage.

It has allowed us to expand our available ESX storage without replacing arrays or adding hardware. It also helps with vMotion and provides disk space for extra clients on hosts with under-allocated CPU/Memory.

The key element is whether virtual storage is the right choice, and what hardware you are going to use. I suppose I could wish for less latency, but that might be coming from configuration as opposed to actual product support – especially since I only see latency on one of the two VSAs that we have deployed.

The things that I wanted almost three years ago when we purchased, have already been improved. Those would have been limited licensing and minimal support documentation. A good alternative might have been to hire an integrator familiar with both HP and VMWare products.

We've had it for about three years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

The stability has been exceptional.

The limitations of two hosts and 10TB per VSA is acceptable for the cost savings.

We use a third-party vendor, so my excellent customer service experience is due to my local contact.

HP technical support has always been good when dealing with enterprise products.

The initial setup for the VSA was straightforward, it uses an OVF virtual appliance. I did have to refer to highly detailed instructions for the vSphere configuration for NICs and iSCSI software adapters. Since this is a virtual SAN, I use only software RAID 0 and no snapshots - those are better handled by the HP hardware arrays and vSphere, respectively.

Since we are a small enterprise shop and I have fairly sophisticated knowledge of both storage and virtualization, I did the implementation myself. I recommend that unless you have solid knowledge of designing and configuring your hypervisor environment that you use an experienced consultant.

Since our gain is roughly equivalent to having a small hardware SAN, and we purchased during a BOGO promotion, I would estimate our ROI somewhere around 900%.

It comes with three years software support, but I've never had to use it.

We compared VMWare VSA to HP StoreVirtual VSA. At that time, the VMWare solution was limited to a single VSA per datacenter, and we use two of the HP VSAs between four hosts, so that was our deciding factor.

It is an excellent alternative to small hardware SANs if you already have the disk space on other servers and adequate network bandwidth for your level of disk activity. I can only comment on use within a vSphere environment, but in my experience, it is simply awesome. I would like to warn that before implementing a VSA, you should thoroughly evaluate your storage and network requirements. Good design of a VSA implementation is just as critical as good design of a hardware SAN.

We use two 4530 shelves in a mirrored SAN configuration, and the ability of the system to virtualize the two shelves as a single storage system is very important to us.

On several occasions, we’ve had a complete power failure at one of our two SAN locations, yet all of our VMs continued to function because the VMs that were running on the downed SAN simply moved to the other SAN without the need for operator intervention. With most other mirrored SAN solutions, the VMs would need to have been manually moved to the other SAN location. With VSA, however, it’s automatic and transparent.

The management system, while OK, could be made a little more user-friendly.

It was installed in April 2015.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It’s been very stable. We've had no issues with instability.

We haven’t outgrown it yet, but if we need additional storage capacity in the future, we can simply add another shelf.

We haven’t needed any technical support yet on this product, but our previous experience with HP SANs was pretty good.

We previously used an HP LeftHand P4500 SAN, the predecessor of the HP VSA. We used it for 5 years but switched to the new one because HP support was ending on the old one and we were out of capacity.

We used an HP partner for the initial setup and configuration. Overall, it was pretty straightforward, although it took a few weeks to get everything “tuned”. Initially, we were getting alarms when moving VMs from one volume to another but bonding the NICs increased the storage bandwidth and resolved the problem.

I definitely recommend purchasing from an HP channel partner as they will handle the licensing. HP licensing can be a very arcane and difficult process and it is best left to the experts. The pricing was comparable with most of the other vendors we looked at.

We looked at a number of products from EMC, Nimble, and Dell, but only the HP VSA could automatically run the VMs from the other SAN in the event of a SAN site failure.

For mission critical systems, I would only recommend this product when used in a mirrored configuration. Unlike other SAN systems where virtually everything in the device is redundant, the HP VSA is basically a server equipped with a bunch of hard disks and special software. Only the power supplies are redundant so there are many more single points of failure compared to other SANs. While other SAN vendors put the redundancy in the same device, the redundancy of the HP VSA is provided by virtue of the two independent devices. What is unique is that the two independent devices appear as a single storage system to the virtualization network and the switching between devices is done by the HP software.

I give the replication feature a 10 out of 10. The GUI for snapshot replication gives you a lot of flexibility to schedule asynchronous replication, bandwidth control, and disk-rebuild resource allotment.

High Availability is a 10 out of 10, too, for having redundant RAID controllers per tray and the ability to build an HA Multi-Site.

I also like the easy setup of these units. We get project bids with zero lead time and when you have to build out a facility and you have a deficit of time to do so, it helps to have a quick and easy install and intuitive GUI. Running updates on these systems is nice and easy. The support staff are also very good.

When we bid on projects and scope out the work, we usually will have three design iterations that we follow -- a Multi-Site, Single-Site P4500, or Single-Site P4300 class setup -- depending on what is needed. All three build-outs use the same CMC and basic setup helps to standardize and help get a handle on costs and budgeting for these projects. We’ve built a multi-tiered storage solution for our customers using one product.

For disk utilization I give it a 7 out of 10. In the typical network RAID 10 coupled with horizontal shelf RAID 5, you lose over 55% of your disk. But this is a price I am willing to pay to have highly-available storage.

I would look into using some of the technologies used in the 3PAR line. The loss of disk space due to traditional RAIDing methods is wasteful, and when you buy 14TB of disk and have 6TB usable, you sometimes whimper a little.

They need to create a separate management port to allow for sending email alerts via non-iSCSI network. As it stands, you have to allow routing from your iSCS network and open relay on your mail server to get alerts. Other storage system models use separate management ports to allow for event notifications.

I have used the product for over six years. We previously used it in our main datacenter for four years, but then opted to go with a more enterprise solution and now use it in smaller remote site build-outs, and it's usually two or three nodes per cluster.

Deployment of these devices is easy and very stable. I have added on many different trays with no problems.

Stability has been good except in one scenario. We had a vSphere Metro-Cluster with HP P4000 Multisite setup, and the coordinating node (VIP holder) completely crashed in a bad way. It seems that the coordinating node was not able to transfer the VIP to a new node in time and when vSphere recognized it as a PDL event (Permanent Device Loss), we were operational within eight minutes after vSphere rescanned for storage, although the storage node motherboard and controller had to be replaced.

For scalability, I give it a 9 out of 10. It is very easy to deploy a new shelf of disk and add a pair of controllers to your environment for increased IO “Pay as you Grow”. You just plug in the network info and add it to the existing cluster. I can just throw another tray of disk into the mix and within a couple hours allocate disk space.

Tech support is good. I have always had good experience with both phone support and on-site support staff. On-site staff went above and beyond to help in problem tickets I had open.

We previously had MSA units, and we chose P4000 class as it was the next step solution for us. We will be evaluating HP StoreServ 8000 series for these remote site setups. We currently use HP StoreServ 7000 series for our main datacenter and may potentially move to this solution if we determine cost savings and ease of setup.

It was easy. Single-sites and multi-sites both had a similar setup. From a cabling perspective, you just plug in your 10gb or 1gb connection to the switch and off you go. Once you install the CMC and you plug in the network information on the nodes, the units are found in the CMC and you can build out the site and cluster.

We built ours in-house. Depending to what degree you will be engaged in the setup will depend on whether you will need other expertise. Working hand-in-hand with your network team and VMware\server team will help. You basically need the network in place before you configure the nodes. Then after configuration of nodes and build-out of clusters\volumes, you need to engage with the members of your team who will help present the volumes to VMware or Windows servers.

When we sign five year contracts to build a facility, we expect the storage units to last that time, and they do.

The price paid for a highly-available solution weighs in here. If one of our facilities is down for an hour, we stand to lose a lot of money (Automotive Assembly), so up-time and life of a unit is, let's assume five years, then demoting this storage to a second-tier storage for other aspects of our company’s needs (backups, file retention, etc.) really are the only ways I feel I can determine ROI, and in this regard I feel we our ROI is good.

It’s a solid product and you can roll these out like nothing. We have standardized our deployments to use these models. We will be re-evaluating soon and if we do I will miss the easy setup and GUI.

We went with ConvergedSystem because it's a single bit of infrastructure where we can have compute and network storage in one place. Our support team can be skilled across all devices from top to bottom and manage all the virtualized workloads, which stands at 7800 VMs right now. We don't need to have a separate storage team, or multiple tickets, or requests between systems.

Another valuable feature is its integration with Eucalyptus which provides us analysis for ultra-light loads. It was ready in four weeks and started taking workloads.

It's saved us a huge amount of money on hardware and other data center costs. The next step for us is to integrate it with backbones. We're still doing traditional provisioning of VMs, but ConvergedSystems allow us to do things for our students. The data and analytics we get speeds up on multiple servers.

We're able to give students access to parts of the system and let them onto 30 servers. We didn't have that capability before. One day we'll allow classrooms to do their own self-servers to really speed things up.

I have concerns of whether the VM workload can be sustained in just a couple of racks.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We had a few legal issues at the start, but we got the issues ironed out and the systems now run themselves.

Technical support has been good. We have a support contract with HP and access to the right people when we need them. However, HP's presence in Australia is a little light.

It was pretty straightforward. It's built offsite to the configurations you want and shipped to you fully-racked. You just plug it into your data center and start it up.

The most valuable feature is that it allows me to have more servers in my data center. Also, the support I get from HP is tremendously valuable. We have VMware, Microsoft, and HP blades, enclosures, and 3PAR in the data center, but HP provides us with a single point-of-contact for any issue. I'm very happy with the support and I've actually seen them worry more about issues than I have been.

The biggest benefit is cost savings because I have to bring in a lot of new technology. For example, with servers, we need one for archiving, another for BI, and another for IT support. With the new virtual environment in ConvergedSystem, I don't need to purchase new servers because I can just create a new server and continue work.

HP needs to be more careful about the partners they select for implementation. With a virtual environment, HP cannot just provide hardware to the customer and expect the customer to complete the implementation themselves. With the virtual environment of ConvergedSystem, you have to do a lot of integrations and software installations. HP should have stricter mechanisms as to which implementation partners they provide their customers. I've had issues with implementation partners, but HP's support has been great and they eventually resolved my problems.

There are stability issues, but I'm happy with the support. No technology is error free, that's why HP has support.

It is highly scalable. We have four links that contain nine servers, and the enclosure itself can go up to 16 blades. The infrastructure has many things, such as FlexFabric, SAN switches, network switches, storage, and the enclosure. If I need to increase capacity, I only need to increase the number of blades and to put in new discs into my 3PAR servers. I believe that with this infrastructure, I can scale for the next seven years.

It fulfills all my requirements, the price is good, and it's scalable.