HPE OneView Reviews

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.

OneView is a monitoring as well as a centralized management solution. We are using it for the virtual data center. We are using it for VMware hypervisors on top of the blades and HPE Synergy.

The best part is that you can integrate a two-way network. Earlier we could not manage the storage and ToR switch. Now we can create a LAN with our storage without any interface. 

In terms of switch management, it is now easy to understand the current configuration. It provides centralized management. It provides a single pane, and you can easily do all updates in one shot. It is a great product.

They can improve reporting and provide more customized reports. Currently, reporting is a bit limited. 

It can be complex to learn and manage for beginners. Because of my experience, I find it comfortable to manage, which might not be the case with beginners. It would be good if they can make it a little bit easier to understand. They can provide a more graphical view of connectivity and other things.

Their technical support can also be improved.

I have been using this solution for almost two years. We started working with OneView in 2019.

It is certainly a reliable solution. We switched to this solution almost two years ago, and I have not faced any kind of issues.

We have not tried to expand it. We are a big organization, and in my team, there are almost 200 to 300 people.

Their technical support can be improved. Dell's technical support is better than HPE.

We are also using Dell and Cisco UCS. Dell's technical support is better than HPE. In terms of hardware, stability, and other things, there are no issues.

Its initial setup was not much difficult. I was not much familiar with it at that time, so their technical team guided us. Its documentation is available on the HPE portal.

We took help from HPE.

It was a management decision. They prefer only HPE Synergy. We didn't evaluate any other solution. We are using it in a lot of data centers. We are using something else only in a couple of data centers.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is very stable. There are very few hardware faults with HPE solutions.

I would rate HPE OneView a ten out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.