HPE OneView Reviews

• Single pane of glass
• Like a dashboard out-of-the-box
• Minimal setup
• Very easy to get going with

Places all of your different HPE products in one place, all in the circles where you can just get everything into nice, easy-to-use silos pretty easily. There's very little user training involved. I mean, out-of-the-box, it's pretty intuitive.

• More on the software development side
• Forms of HPE's REST API
• Different web services available for the product, especially connecting OneView back to HPE Passport and HPE Ticketing Solutions.

There is a lot of automated stuff in there, but we'd like to step into the middle of that and bring in our own different tools as a part of that integration. That would be nice.

We would really love to see greater integration, something I've raised with the HPE software engineers. They have been very forthcoming and very honest about what they'd like to do with the product.

Since they went to Version 3, it's been excellent. We had a couple of beta versions before that, which kind of just sitting around the office. Nobody was really using them. But then when Version 3 came out, it was so stable that it just started to take off.

We went from having maybe a couple of chassis in there, to having 50 or 60 C-Class chassis in there. As we add more equipment, the speed and the latency of the product seem to stay pretty low, which is awesome.

We have used HPE tech support. We had an HPE systems engineer come to the data center and help us install it. We had a demo on the Synergy frames that is imperative to setting up OneView. He came and set it all up for us. It was excellent, like hands-on, no question that couldn't be asked and no question that couldn't be answered. It is really good.

SIM does not really fit anymore. It was awesome for Gen 6 and previous, but when you go to Gen 7, 8, 9, and now Gen 10, there's so much new technology in there that you need a more complex silo or a more complex tool, like OneView. We are a full, 100% HPE shop, so it's just natural that we'd pick an excellent HPE software product to go with our excellent HPE hardware products.

When selecting a vendor, I look for good communication, excellent products, and friendly staff.

Get in there early and look at integrating, because Gen 7 and below is not going to be supported anymore. Anything new you buy can be used with OneView now, within a one life-cycle of your data center, or with one five-year life-cycle. Everything will be supported in there.

The most valuable feature is the single pane of glass. Also, it is easy to use.

It makes us more agile. It makes integration and things of that nature much easier.

Off the top of my head, I don't have any comment.

Stability is excellent.

One of the great parts about it is the scalability.

I have not used technical support.

It's a particular tool to help us in managing our environment. So, it was something that we needed to have. Just something you know when you manage your environment that you have to have a tool like that. It's very good.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

To be honest, the price point is pretty spot on.

I would definitely advise them to work with HPE. Their products speak for themselves. They do what they say they're going to do. And HPE, changing the way they have over the last couple years, it's been amazing. I've enjoyed it immensely.

HPE OneView is a management interface to manage hardware in a VMware environment. It is used for managing different servers and pushing out the firmware and operating software.

I use HPE OneView for management, performance-related issues, network issues, capacity, costing, and upgrading the firmware for different servers.

The most valuable features of HPE OneView are environment monitoring, the ease of firmware upgrade, and the ability to manage all the servers and the infrastructure from one team. With HPE OneView, I can have a competitive review of the system and manage it. The solution allows you to have a hardware profile that you can push through maybe new servers.

The solution provides a single pane possibility of seeing all these servers. The solution also helps monitor, perform an upgrade, and look at resource availability. I use HPE OneView to monitor the system. With HPE OneView, I can manage the hardware, computing, and storage from one software.

HPE OneView should be able to cover more device models apart from ProLiant and Synergy. It would be good if we could incorporate HPE OneView into GreenLake. Instead of having everything go to HPE GreenLake Central, we could have access to manage GreenLake through HPE OneView.

The solution's bootup takes a very long time, and it should be reduced.

I have been using HPE OneView for more than a year.

HPE OneView is a stable solution.

The solution's scalability depends on the number of servers. We have a few enterprise customers, but the majority of our customers for HPE OneView are small and medium-sized businesses.

The solution's technical support is satisfactory.

Positive

We have integrated HPE OneView with VMware for storage management. Before purchasing the solution, users should first have a very good understanding of it through courses or practical experience.

Overall, I rate HPE OneView an eight out of ten.

Just the ability to provision the servers with storage and network everything within one interface, not having to go into multiple interfaces to provision those pieces.

For us with the flexibility that it has given to us, I would rate it very highly. But, again, this was a game changing move for us, to go into something where we could easily provision systems, easily move those workloads from one physical enclosure to another physical enclosure without having to audit enclosures. It gave us a secret pane of glass.

My team did not actually manage storage before. When we brought this in, everything flows into OneView, so we managed the storage, we managed the fiber fabric and the compute. Really the only thing that we don't manage at this point is the Cisco switches. Everything else my team actually manages within that OneView interface.

So, for us, just the simplicity of being able to manage everything within that single pane of glass has been just huge for us. A lot of time savings for us. Being able to take that profile, and just making a copy of it, and just deploy stuff rapidly again, as opposed to doing it one server at a time has really taken and given some of my team more time to do some of the more proactive stuff.

So, I would have to say for us, personally, at our company, it's been a ten. I think it's also made it a little simpler for us to actually deploy systems. It's also given it the ability to move workloads from one physical structure to another physical structure if they're all managed with the same OneView environment.

So, it's added some flexibility for us. We've shifted to BOOT from SAN because of it, where we're actually replicating some of that data from one data center to another and then utilizing OneView to create a profile just to bring those replicated lines back up at the second site.

Our company was actually part of a - I don't even know what they call it - but you sit down with HP, they talk to you about features that you would like to see with their next release, and then actually a few months later they brought us into the HP campus and they actually showed us some of the things they were doing with the next release of the OneView.

Some of the things that we said at that time was better ability to do firmware. So, we obviously follow a chain-management process. Within that chain-management process we have to be able to show, "Hey, here's the list of servers that need this firmware," and then also give a report afterwards saying, "Hey, here are those lists of servers and here's their firmware now, but they're up-to-date."

So those were some of the things that we were asking, it was just some improvements on reporting and then improvements on how we do the patch process, in general, for firmware and drivers and things like that. So, that's really what we were looking for, and those were things that they were showing us that there's going to be possibly capabilities in the future release.

We've been on it only for about two and a half years, but it's been a game-changer for us. I really like it. It's a really good product for us.

We've really had very few issues with it. Initially stability, as far the application being up, has been good. We ran into a couple of issues here and there with the baselines for the firmware and not having enough space on the appliance itself to be able to have more than two baselines.

We actually work with HP, they had a way for us to expand that space where we could do more baselines, and so once that happened, we were pretty good.

Scalability has been good. We've actually scaled an additional, I want to say, five or six enclosures and added it to the environment, and we've really had no issues with it whatsoever as far as just bringing it in and increasing our storage footprint, or increasing our computer footprint, or whatever it's been.

It's really been pretty seamless for us. I mean, once you get it in, it really reads all the information for you and then you've got it. So it's been good.

We have used technical support, like I was mentioning with the space issue that we've had. We've used technical support just in general, OneView included, just on some of the ways that we wanted to actually do our profiles, so we could do that replication between sites. So, we did engage with them in things like that.

So I'll be honest, in my role, I'm not really doing the face-time with that. My team has not really ever come to me with any kind of issues. We actually have an account support manager from HP who is specific for the OneView environment that we own.

So typically what they'll do is they'll open up a ticket with HP, but then they'll send that information to the ASM and he'll really get things moving if things are stagnant for us.

So, before that we just had C7000 enclosures and we were just logging into each OA and just doing profiles individually per enclosure. So, now with OneView we create the profiles, but then we have ten enclosures included into that system.

We can just move stuff where we want. We didn't have that capability before. We never linked our C7000s, so each C7000 had its own profiles and its own OA that we had to login.

The setup was pretty straightforward. So to be honest, at the end, we brought in HP services to do the implementation of OneView. Obviously, we sat there with them and got an understanding of what they were doing and what the product did and how you installed it.

It's just basically a virtual client, so it wasn't really all that difficult to set up.

We actually looked at UCS and HP. We were looking for a converged environment, but we really didn't want just a canned approach to that.We had some limitations from our networking side on what gear they would allow us to use. We're a Cisco shop for networking. And, so most of the HP converge systems come with their own network and everything. We couldn't use the network.

So, we really worked with HP and they worked with us, and we actually came up with a custom converged environment where we used Cisco for the networking. But then, it's a great powerful storage and everything else is what they had.

We built a new data center. We needed something that was going to be a little more progressive than just racking a server, racking a server, building an application. We needed the capability to do site-to-site replication on not just virtual machines, but physical hardware. That's why we looked at the two systems.

To be honest with you, OneView was the deciding factor on going with HP, opposed to the other vendor, because with the other vendor, like I was saying, you had to go to the origin. This is mine. And we want something that we can just do everything in one pane and be done.

First and foremost when selecting a product, its got to fit within our environment. So, it can't be something that's kind of left out there that's just way off of what we do with standards and things like that.

We've been an HP shop for a long time. We've been in an enclosure shop for a long time. So, familiarity was another piece. Trying to teach your team, or have your team try to learn new equipment or new technologies that are not in line with what they're already doing can be a very large undertaking. I think familiarity and just a fit within our environment are a couple of the keys that we really look at.

So, I'm an X86 person. We also have an AIX environment, as well,along with Linux. They are obviously on power, so IBM for the AIX stuff. On X86, we're all HP hardware.

Obviously, we use Cisco, we use Brocade, Citrix, Microsoft. Those are our short list of vendors that we deal with a lot.

I would just say, "Make sure you do your diligence. Make sure you look at every aspect of what you're going to be bringing in. Make sure that none of those pieces are going to be in any kind of conflict, or harder for you to manage or take care of.

Go with the one that fits your company that you can manage. There is less of a market curve for your company. At the end of the day, that's time spent on non-work, or non-proactive, or any of that stuff.

You're spending time trying to learn a new environment, or a new system when you still need to be doing work that you're doing.

So, I would just say, make sure you vet out the whole environment and not just one piece of it.

Well, it's in my lab right now. It's great because it tracks warranty and support status but it also gives me the ability to go in and configure server profiles. It's primarily in a blade enclosure. I can manage server profiles and I can manage networks, all from one place.

Well, it gives me the ability to also do firmware updates and schedule those and track those firmware updates so I can see if it complies with a profile for firmware and drivers and all that.

Well I was at the booth and I guess they're going to announce it here in a few minutes, the version 3.1 and all the stuff that they've added in 3.1. It just keeps getting better, more support for more hardware, more functionality.

Well, the newer hardware, that's the biggest thing. You've got some of the newer StoreVirtual devices and more functionality in the storage networking and iSCSI stuff, and support for some of those arrays.

It was kind of rough around the edges in version 1 but much stabler in 1.2. Version 2 and version 3 are much, much, much better.

Well, you can scale it but they've got tools. It can only go to so many enclosures. I think it's 40 enclosures. 20 or 40, I can't remember exactly. But they built a manager of managers to do more capacity and more installations.

Well when you're a partner you don't get HP Tech Support on your demo licenses so I had to build it myself but I managed to get through it and it's not inherently hard but you've got to pay attention to the details.

I was using the previous solution, Insight Control and HPSim, so this is much better.

There wasn't really and option for alternative solutions as we're an HP partner.

When considering vendors it is important that they have support for their products. If you buy one solution, you want to be able to manage that and maybe other solutions so they're starting to pull in the rack mount servers for OneView as well, so that will become a nice ecosystem. You can deal with storage networking and other various servers with the same interface.

You have got to look at the economics because it's not free.

You can use OneView to monitor, so if all you need is something to go in and give an alert that something's broken, that's fine, that's free. But if you want the management capabilities and the drill down and more configuration doing things, then you're going to have to buy the licenses.

OneView is a tool that we use primarily to speed up the deployment operations of infrastructure. We use it to eliminate human error in deployments and it allows us to compute much faster. It gives us a very easy program for the REST API interface. To summarize, the benefits are speed of deployment and reduced errors

In terms of our role as a HPE reseller, we are able to provide a distinct solution in the market place. It really helps our customers do a better job deploying infrastructure faster. One of the things we do is provide skills transfer.

I would like to see some GUI based features around decommissioning hardware. The management tools in the existing HPE infrastructure were good, but they were aging. That's really where OneView kind of made their mark from the ground up with an all new solution. They actually started from the ground up to just understand that our existing management tools were aging and we needed to improve that. That was a big thing to us.

The solution is pretty stable. We are in revision 3. It has been over three years now, and every revision has gotten better. One of the advantages of OneView is that even if something happens, it doesn't affect the work.

Scalability is decent. They've recently released a tool called OneView mobile dashboard. This allows you to aggregate a number of OneView appliances. The benefit is that the OneView implementation can be in separate data centers and you can aggregate things. Individual scalability was already decent and then with the addition of One View mobile dashboard, it has significantly improved.

Technical support is pretty good and it is getting better all the time. When the tool set first launched, the HPE support organization had some challenges. From what I've heard from customers, the consensus is that the HPE support staff is getting better.

At the time, we were managing our HPE blade systems with Virtual Connect Manager and an on-board administrator. This was the normal HPE tool set that existed at the time.

When choosing a vendor, support is important. As a re-seller, when we take a product to market and sell it to costumers, we really need to be confident that we've been able to put it through its paces. We want to know about the testing and quality assurance ourselves. We don’t want to take the vendor's word for it.

Once we've decided to move forward with that partnership, it becomes important for us that we have a deep bench system behind us. If we run out of runway, we want to know that we've got a partner to resolve things for us.

The initial setup was straightforward.

HPE was a big one on our short list. We also have reseller relationships with Dell, Nutanics, and Pure Storage. We represent about 50 different vendors. We chose HPE, because we feel like they have the most complete kind of eco-system level vision.

If you have HPE compute in place today, you should definitely look at using OneView. If you're looking at selecting a compute vendor, I think HPE OneView is a compelling reason to go with HPE.

For OneView, it's probably two things.

• Having the single pane of glass interface into the actual solutions that we're deploying and using.
• Above and beyond that, actually utilizing the OneView Global Dashboard. That's what we're utilizing to show everything.

We don't have a lot of installations, but it's there to show the customers that if they have multiple installations of OneView, they can integrate it all into a single pane of glass, so they can manage their infrastructure more effectively.

It keeps us from having to go and do things manually. So, the benefits are:

• firmware updates
• OS deployments
• managing the blade infrastructure that we have
• being able to change the blade infrastructure on the fly
• going in and changing server profiles
• updating the firmware levels

So, it makes it easier for us to do all that as well for our customers.

Honestly, I was just working with one of the Beta versions in one of the hands-on labs and I think from a management functionality, it's very complete with regards to the hardware and what the different offerings have as far as management is concerned.

Maybe it could be a little faster. Also, streamlining the code a little bit, making it a little bit more responsive. I noticed as we were doing this in a virtualized environment here in the labs, that it seems to occasionally have choke points that slow it down a little bit and then it speeds back up.

So far, it's been rock-solid. No problems whatsoever. It's run. Every update is applied, no issues. It just works.

Well, like I said, with Global Dashboard, we have the ability to aggregate that all under a single pane of glass. We've only got one instance, but I've seen it where they've got numerous instances underneath that and it seems to all work just fine.

I haven't used the technical support.

Well, like I said, we've got multiple vendors. Actually I came from an IBM background initially, but also a Lenovo background and then I took on the HP architecture products, just because they knew I had a background in X86.

I'm the one who set it all up in our lab. It was very easy. Very straightforward. So, it goes in very simply. We have it running in our virtualization forum and it manages everything we have there.

I think in general, we looked for responsiveness, and the ability to get to the people you need to get to when you have an issue or a problem. Obviously product quality, I think is going to be another huge consideration. Then for me, reselling this, a lot of the management products are going to be a big key.

Take your time. Learn the features. Learn how it integrates in your environment and it'll serve you well.