One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open.

Another area of improvement is the expansion node. Because today, we can add a few disks, which is limited. Or scale out. But in the capacity upgrades, there is a kind of limitation somewhere.

In future releases, I would like to see more advanced features in terms of replication on the DR side. Because today, the product is doing what should be done. But it's not at the same level with the other third-party vendors like Veeam, applications like Commvault, and other production.

The product must provide more storage capability.

If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage.

The solution's technical support services could be better.

Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes.

Customers are more concerned about the applications of their businesses, so HPE Hyper Converged needs to come up with a purpose-based HCI solution.

Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model. HPE needs to make the documentation part easy.

I think the solution could be more secure and more economical.

The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency.

The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced.

In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM. I'm specifically talking about certain propositions in the dHCI that only support VMware as the Hypervisor. They could have all different layers of Hypervisors, like the KVM or X, Y, Z.

Currently dHci Nimble offers only VMware as native hypervisor and will be great if it can support others  like Red Hat, KVM etc too. Although this is not a limitation as one can install Red Hat & other operating systems as a Virtual machine on top of VMware hypervisor. 

The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights. 

We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME. 

I'm guessing that the next release will be the SimpliVity stack. I don't know. It seems like they've got a lot of features packed in there. There's nothing that comes to mind in terms of improvement. It has worked pretty well. We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem.

From the release that we have, we'd like to see better integration with vCenter and OneView. I believe the vCenter integration is available in an update that was released earlier this year. We have not applied it yet. It is complex to set up and it is not something you would really want to have to do yourself.

The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites. I heard that the version 2 of the software handles that better.

We are working with HPE to get the software updated to the new version.

Our implementation involved two separate clusters at two different locations. We wanted to be able to manage the two clusters from a peered vcenter instance so we could have 2 independent clusters but one management point. The version of software and OneView that were available at the time of installation did not support peered vCenters.

So better integration will all of the features supported by vCenter. There might be another option it was not discussed at the time of the install if there was or is.

In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing.

The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases.

The solution should have more in-depth manuals or user information. This would not only help us but also assist our customers.

Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower. HPE Hyper Converged is more expensive than traditional solutions without HCI, but our customers are impressed with the overall features of this product.

One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host. While in the normal VM, we just used the existing viable machine and moved it to another host without an issue.

As this product is new to me, I need to do a bit more training to see what it offers.

It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful.

It could be cheaper, everything could be cheaper.

This solution is very costly.

The pricing could be improved. It's quite an expensive solution.

The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better.

The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM.

Because it's so well integrated, you can't get away from it. You can't replace one part without the whole tool going down.

I would like to see more deduplication. This is incredibly important, because if you have five sets of the same piece of data, it is stored five times. We only want it stored once to save space.

I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes.

The HE380 is already a good step forward with the first product, which was the CS250, which was really cool. It was just a 2U box (chassis). It had a lot of performance in there, but not that much flexibility on the storage and VDI side.

HPE CS380 is really spot on. It is the right answer from HPE to give you more flexibility. The next thing will be newer, faster hardware, more flexibility, and more options to get even more flexibility.

The downside of the solution is the scalability because they grow using nodes, but it's not desegregate. If you want to add more computers or more space, you need to add another node. It's the only negative in the solution. 

The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved. However, I do not think HPE is planning to improve it at this time. They will probably look to EOL it, because HPE SimpliVity has resolved this issue, but at a higher price tag.

To resolve this issue with HPE Hyper Converged, I will buy a backup appliance, then I will shift my data which I am not using often to a backup appliance. This will be offline data and solve my issues.

I would like to see price points when there are larger solutions. If we have a solution where we’re going up against a couple hundreds of TBs, the price point is often too high.

I would like to see more flexibility in the offered configurations.

For instance a software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice. This would give me the opportunity to use existing hardware in my datacenter and run the Simplivity software on top of that giving me access to all nice features of the Data Virtualization Platform of Simplivity.

An area for improvement would be the ease of installation and setup.

I would really like to see an improvement in the stability. We've experienced a few issues with the stability, because HP brings out a new version every month, and that's very complicated. For instance, we see firmware from the host, vSphere itself, and then there are many steps you have to do in a very short time. I would prefer fewer updates because we as customers, who don't have IT experience, aren't familiar with these steps and it is really difficult for us.

In the next version, I would like to see an easier upgrade procedure that doesn't take much time and that is easier to understand. 

Data protection and optimization: It is really weak. They do not offer deduplication or compression. Also, we do not have a real backup solution. It is just snapshots, which is forcing us to do automatic backups of the extremely important data on different servers. Thus, if I can have a deal with HPE to have an upgrade to SimpliVity with our current agreement, it would work well. We are in negotiations and we hope to reach happy ending soon.

I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI.

Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving.

In the next release, I would like to see more protection and more options.

In our organization, we can't buy expensive solutions, so if HPE could come out with a cheaper version, it would be great!

I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management.