HP came on-site to help set up and train. They were hands on, and the training was good, as the interface is easy enough to be very understandable. The training we had is enough for us to scale out and add additional nodes in the future on our own.

All our HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) systems are implemented via the vendor teams that handle most of our on-site work followed by in-house Storage Administration team member(s) for additional storage-level configuration.

The implementation was all completed in-house with some limited input from the vendor partner group.

My advice – plan your installation, think about your geography, consider what the technology can do for you, think about the networking, consider that like any storage, it works well plugged into the high end backbone and not just available ports on some local access switch.

If you fail to think about the connectivity correctly, performance can be affected. Finally, latency is king, so keep your eye on the performance monitor within the CMC.

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.

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.

We had an external team handle the implementation for us. They are integrators and they continuously assist with maintenance on an ongoing basis.

HPE Installation Services are recommended. Since we are an integrator, we provide this.

We had configuration and design changes through our journey of deploying our cloud infrastructure. HP was very understanding and very flexible. We started from some basic principles and we realized that we needed to make changes to be successful in the future. HP was very flexible in addressing some of the gaps that we came across through our deployment journey and took those on as challenges and addressed them. They made things happen.

Rather than say that it was too late, or that we've agreed and signed off on things, or that they're sorry but we'll have to go through a second round of investments, HP was very happy to reopen designs and to reconsider parameters and constraints. They gave us an evolutionary path through our deployment cycle to make sure that when we were up and running with our initial customers, we'd be able to meet all the requirements.

We did it using an an in-house team. If you have already some storage knowledge, this install is very easy.

We implemented it via an in-house service. Testing different workloads on your SAN is a good idea. This helps you to have a comparison point for later users. In case people encounter trouble in production, you can then easily compare performance with the different workloads.

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.

Only the first implementation with a vendor team. After that it is straightforward.

I implemented it myself. I would suggest deploying in a dev environment first, to ensure thorough understanding. It is not exactly intuitive.

I was part of the vendor team.

We implemented it ourselves as we are architects and consultants. This the best way to learn and gain experience.

Read the HPE content from 2014 and then watch the StoreVirtual VSA “How To” video series on YouTube. Talk to someone who knows and has implemented LeftHand, if possible.

The implementation was all completed in-house with some input from an HP partner.

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.

We did it in-house.