The setup is okay, however, it comes with a moderate amount of difficulty. If you are new to the product, it is difficult. You do get used to the process over time and it gets easier. 

A company just needs one person to maintain the solution as it just runs. You don't need any support staff. It's very, very hands-off except when you do updates. The product is living its own life.

It was a very smooth setup. We were given a small check-list, we prepared, and then HP came in, set it up, and trained us.

It's a little bit complex to implement the solution. After a while, it's easy. However, the first time you do it it's quite complex. The way networking is designed, it's complicated because you need two virtual features. It's just a little complicated from a network setup perspective.

It takes two to three days to deploy the solution, which isn't too long.

StoreVirtual setup is actually really simple. There are a couple of different ways that you can do it now. You can set it up from intelligent provisioning, which is included on every Proliant server. It will go out to the internet, pull down the bits, and deploy it for you. It's all sort of work-flowed and really simple. If you wanted to, you could pull down the bits yourself and there is a wizard that deploys it. That's also really simple. You have to do a little bit of planning of how you build your rate sets and drive sets and stuff that are going to be underneath it, but it's incredibly easy to deploy, whether you are doing bare metal, or BSA like we are doing.

Initial setup is fairly straightforward. You get a bunch of disks, put it into your system, present it as a virtual disk, install your VSA, done. You want redundancy of two nodes, install another and tie them together, after installing the fail over manager virtual machine as well. Instant three node cluster. It self discovers all components as well. My most complex thing was actually making sure it was secure. That involves adding more firewall, split networking, and pull it into hypervisor management for VAAI and so on. That took a little bit of effort, but it is not overwhelming.

I bought one one year and the second the next year. I’m a typical small enterprise, where I plan all my expenses very carefully. Until I had both of them, I didn't put anything mission critical on it.

I would say it is medium complex. I know I had one guy that understood it, he left the company, and didn't leave good documentation. We got a new node in and it took my guys a little bit to figure out how to get it set up. It's not like it's intuitive, but it's a process. It's not super complex, but once you do it and document it properly, then it's fairly straightforward.

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.

It was reasonably straightforward.

The initial setup was very straightforward. It was very simple.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The CMC logically guides you through the setup and configuration process. This does negate the requirement to plan the implementation, but even if you choose not to use the wizard and manually configure management groups, cluster groups, FOM instances, etc., the CMC lets you know what needs to be completed first.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't handle the implementation myself and neither did my team, so I don't know enough about it to really talk about what was involved and if it was straightforward or not.

It may take one person to handle the maintenance, but we have an integrator that handles that aspect of the solution for us. We typically buy five or six days a year from our integrator in order for them to handle maintenance for us.

Initial setup is easy, but the differences from traditional storage requires some learning curve. You need to know about managers concept of StoreVirtual. Fortunately newer versions of centralized management console (CMC) provides warnings when you have configurations that would result in reduced availability.

I'm in pre-sales, so I don't deal with the implementation process. I don't know if it's complex or not.

It's pretty simple. It has a little bit of a learning curve. They're all the same; they all do very similar things. It's learning what they call them and exactly where to find the buttons. That's really what it comes down to.

It's very straightforward and the basic setup only took a couple of hours. The GUI is very user friendly and the documentation and white papers provided us all the required info.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward as HP did a good job providing excellent documentation and best practices.

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.

The setup has been really easy. I did it three or four times after the system board failed. It was easy to run through the system, but the tech support guys kind of walked me through what we needed to do, and actually I set it up in the first place, so that's been real good too.

A complete installation of a four-node cluster can be done within four hours to be ready to move your VMs to the new cluster. It's very easy.

We are moving more into the enterprise solutions now. The HP ConvergedSystem enabled us to take a step in that direction but not be overbearing in terms of the technology. The configuration and initial setup was a little bit of a challenge for us as we needed to train our staff. Now our staff that are trained up and it's fairly simple and straightforward.

The initial setup is straightforward, not a complex procedure.

I was involved in the setup process. It was easy.

The installation and creation of the ‘cluster’ was fairly straightforward. Volume creation and additional required configuration was a bit more complex.

The initial setup is straightforward.

There's an installation wizard which is quite simple. However, you need to have a clear image of the final scheme, especially for the network. At the time, I missed a reference blueprint, but a recent publication of "StoreVirtual VSA Ready Nodes" filled the gap.

The difficult part about the setup is the network part. You need to configure flow control, jumbo frames, LACP trunks, and, in some cases, spanning tree correctly. Once the network setup is correct, the configuration is very straight forward.

The initial setup of both hardware-based StoreVirtual as well as the VSA are absolutely straightforward. OK, we were trained and experienced already, so there was no big challenge. However, there are still quite a lot of things you need to understand (especially in VMware environments) which can cause performance or availability issues if you don't follow certain (sometimes not clearly communicated) best practices.

But if you do everything right, you'll have a highly-stable, highly-available, and well-performing platform. We put all basics and learnings together and created our own two-day training (also available as video training) to teach admins and implementers how to do the important things right.

The initial setup is very straightforward and not at all difficult. There are good HPE written documents and YouTube videos as well as some good independent content on sites such as https://www.bitcon.be/.

The initial setup is straightforward. As long as you have some experience with storage systems, you should be fine.

It was straightforward, I would say. We did it with our partner.

It just goes in, and you don't really need any help.

The solution is not complex to implement as well. It's very straightforward. I found it to be quite simple.

It was straightforward by using the HP CMC software.

The initial setup is straightforward if you have SAN knowledge.

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.

The initial setup is very simple. Just think about your design with the management groups and clusters.