According to HPE, they say that they will stop making updates from maybe next year or something

The GUI is a bit old-fashioned. It should be updated. 

We need the solution to offer support for newer VMware. It only supports up to version 7. It doesn't cover version 8. 

We are experiencing some latency that we’re resolving with HP.

The challenge we have right now is that the product reaches its end of life in October of 2022. They should continue producing this solution.

The initial setup could be simplified to make it easier for new users.

The solution should offer a simpler network setup.

The product's interface is a bit dated. They should refresh its design.

As for features that can be improved, it is a costly solution. Maybe upgrading to the new model is better. Additionally, it could be more scalable, the scalability can be more loaded.

Lastly, it could use SD to rehash hybrid storage.

The user interface needs to be updated. It's getting kind of long in the tooth, and the user interface makes it look a lot more complex than it actually is to manage, and I think that you can mask a lot of that with a refresh of the user interface. While HPE has created a new HTML5 UI for the HyperConverged 380, it is not available to the rest of the StoreVirtual population.  

The management console upgrade needs a bit of work. In some cases, it will not upgrade due to the non-removal of other HPE StoreVirtual Components. Be sure to remove other components first. The other issue is a login issue. There is a built-in timeout and once that timeout hits, the only way to log back in is to kill the management console. That bit me hard during an upgrade and I had to reinstall one of my nodes. There is a replay or login cache that is not working properly and should be settable by the administrator and disabled during upgrades. Sometimes upgrades can take a while.

The only thing that comes to mind was we had some issues with once we used up storage and then moved it out and had empty, white space areas, but getting that storage back is a long, painful process. You actually have to run a manual command line on each LUN individually to reclaim the storage.

Making it easier, automated, or being able to do it right from the console would be a great benefit because right now, again, we have to go to a command line and issue that for LUN, there's hundreds of LUNs, so it takes a very long time to go through that process.

I have concerns of whether the VM workload can be sustained in just a couple of racks.

• Inability to customize alerting thresholds.
• Un-usability of the HP CMC for HP LH OS upgrade when a newer version is released but not upgraded although the to-be-upgraded version is an older one.
• Failure to report on lower-level hardware issue via HP CMC and/or SANMON UI unless checking iLO GUI.
• Inability to re-configure/modify iLO settings via HP LH OS.
• Multiple HP SANIQ / LH OS upgrade issues, e.g. upgrade resource partition unavailable, especially if the systems have been running for close to or more than a year.
• Bug(s) in the HP-provided software for the host server systems not detected/identified by HP QA/QE and caused multiple post software-upgrade outages.
• Difficulty on even opening a case due to poor record-keeping of/by HP.

I would like to have this solution easily integrate with VMware.

For this particular product, I was talking to one of their storage people about it. They already added the few things that I needed. So I don't have anything major. But it would nice to have deduplication or compression, things that you have in some of the higher end products.

It needs further improvements in terms of reporting from the CMC, specifically more detailed alerting from the CMC.

I find it rather tedious to manage. To give an example, I was upgrading one of our very first management groups from 10.5.00 to 11.5.00. The VSA VM’s were deployed from an older OVF template (which is running out of, but still in support). I contacted HP support prior to upgrading seeking advice and best practice guidance. I upgraded the LeftHand OS version to 11.5.00.

A month or so down the line, the partition OS drive on both VSA VM’s was full – causing the cluster to go into an operational, not unmanageable state (cluster was not writing any logs, was unable to do root cause analysis of issue that had occurred). The only way to clear this partition was to log a call with HP support and have a remote session to allow them to do so (they have to provide a password to access the support shell of the VM’s). The partition of these VM’s cannot be increased as it may corrupt the OS. I now have to plan upgrading both nodes in the cluster.

It comes down to the information that you get. If you're doing the 10Gb adapters, SFPs don't come with it, but it doesn't say that. It might say that somewhere else, but it's not clear. Depending on if you go DAK or optical, it could be like, $600-$1,000 a pop, which is not insignificant. You know what, just spell it out somewhere. Put it in the ordering tool somewhere, so people know. Apart from that, I don't have anything. I think they're still on gen 8. They should move up to gen 9.

The management system, while OK, could be made a little more user-friendly.

For disk utilization I give it a 7 out of 10. In the typical network RAID 10 coupled with horizontal shelf RAID 5, you lose over 55% of your disk. But this is a price I am willing to pay to have highly-available storage.

I would look into using some of the technologies used in the 3PAR line. The loss of disk space due to traditional RAIDing methods is wasteful, and when you buy 14TB of disk and have 6TB usable, you sometimes whimper a little.

They need to create a separate management port to allow for sending email alerts via non-iSCSI network. As it stands, you have to allow routing from your iSCS network and open relay on your mail server to get alerts. Other storage system models use separate management ports to allow for event notifications.

The management aspect of the solution needs to be improved in order to make the product stronger.

There is no next release. The product is coming to end-of-life in the next three years.

The new Quorum Witness function is promising for easier deployment but needs better reliability.

In our country, Qatar, most of the industry isn't using too much HP. StoreVirtual doesn't move fast. It's not a popular product.

A virtualization platform should be added to this platform.

It's not an active-active cluster. It's active-passive cluster. The customers are looking for active-active features in their storage solution. The solution should offer this.

There's one thing that just drives me nuts. It's the fact that it doesn't have any dedicated management. I know that they've got 10 gig and they've got one gig. You can put those in there, but I'd really like to see dedicated management ports on the backsides of them.

Features like data deduplication would be great because in the end, this solution requires a lot of raw disk space because of the use of RAID5 on the hardware and RAID1 on the network.

StoreVirtual should offer QoS per v-disk or ISCSi.

The key element is whether virtual storage is the right choice, and what hardware you are going to use. I suppose I could wish for less latency, but that might be coming from configuration as opposed to actual product support – especially since I only see latency on one of the two VSAs that we have deployed.

The things that I wanted almost three years ago when we purchased, have already been improved. Those would have been limited licensing and minimal support documentation. A good alternative might have been to hire an integrator familiar with both HP and VMWare products.

You cannot easily mix SAS with SATA or SSD within a cluster. So tiering is not easy to implement at a reasonable cost.

Product looks like it is in the end of development. HPE will be probably be merging with SimpliVity. I hope they will continue the product as we already have multiple HW servers besides HPE, and a software SDS means more flexibility for us.

HP needs to be more careful about the partners they select for implementation. With a virtual environment, HP cannot just provide hardware to the customer and expect the customer to complete the implementation themselves. With the virtual environment of ConvergedSystem, you have to do a lot of integrations and software installations. HP should have stricter mechanisms as to which implementation partners they provide their customers. I've had issues with implementation partners, but HP's support has been great and they eventually resolved my problems.

For our use, it provides what we need. I don't think there's much else they can throw into the converged box. I don't think, however, it would be suitable for our actual production environments because we need something much more sophisticated and expandable. It would need more constituent parts for storage and compute to work faster.

Hardware and disk failures are happening frequently.

The next release is already out and I found that the many of the improvements that we were thinking about in the product such as the dual controller, are already implemented.

The penalty for the availability is performance. So, you have to balance or choose between the availability and the performance. We chose availability, but it would have an impact in the performance.

Management of the system is tedious. Stability needs improvement. The system would work fine for weeks and then one of the VSA virtual machines would hang, taking down the clustered volume. This was very confusing, because I had four nodes, which should have allowed fault-tolerance.

One of the areas that need improvement is the consolidated management platform, to manage all of the nodes from one place and the licensing around that.

There is an issue that I have found with many hyper-converged solutions or systems that you build out into a hyper-converged platform, which is that the management interface is not always consolidated on-site.

Configuration of application integrated snapshots for VMware is convoluted and it did not work immediately.

The way iSCSI sessions are handled could be improved. But if your system is designed right, this isn’t an issue. I’m quite curious to see the improvements in the next version because this already is a very mature and complete product.

From my perspective, these things are missing:

• Homogeneous management of 3PAR, StoreVirtual and MSA
• Remote Copy (sync or at least async) to/from StoreVirtual (similar to online import from EVA, EMC, etc., just expanded to continuously copying)
• Integration of Priority Optimization with VMware vSphere and vVols on the VM level straight from the vSphere web client
• StoreServ iSCI VSA

The capacity utilization is the worst in the industry as far as I know. Data compaction in the form or dedupe and compression, while on the roadmap, is long overdue. A serviceable (e.g. practical) “Network RAID 5” would also help the capacity utilization issue.

I think the user interface could be improved as well as the general ease of use. You're not looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars on these applications. What you're trying to do is simplify things. 

Licensing is not exactly straightforward, but not the worst I have ever seen.  

I would like to have the option to configure and get detailed alerts from the Centralized Management Console.

I can't say at the moment. I'm happy with it right now. There is always room to improve.

It would be nice if there were more parts available in Brazil and HPE could swap out faulty equipment quicker.

Using multiple bonded network interfaces needs work.

I'm not sure if HP is integrating various platforms and coming out with newer options on this solution. It needs to be upgraded from time to time. There are some upgrades which are due to take in new features. 

The solution needs to ensure it is on par with the industry in terms of availability of features and various other options.

Communication of HP firmware and BIOS updates need work. Also, the directives relating to the products need to be improved.

The stability isn’t as good as a traditional SAN as the nodes run an operating system and act like a storage server.

It needs support for clustering different disk nodes - nodes of different sizes.

It needs to have an SSD solution.