HPE OneView Reviews

OneView is the software stack that is running on top of Synergy and on top of the HPE Hyper Converged 380 solution. Customers who buy separate servers can install it, and all the various elements, themselves.

OneView is the one tool where you can manage your build environment, the hyper-converged environment, or the Synergy environment yourself.

The user experience makes it easier for the administrator because new, not so new, and old environments will be managed in the same way. There is an efficiency thing as well because you don't have to be an expert in hybrid IT (private cloud and public cloud). It's the same interface for all of them.

I’d like to see more functionality going towards the hybrid IT. It is cloud economics in which we will see more and more of the private cloud and their own data centers as well.

The connection with Azure Stack, which was recently announced, demonstrates the connection between the local data center and Microsoft Azure. I see more and more features that will come together.

Can't be easier: eploy the OVA file, boot the appliance and enter the IP address and password... That's it!

I have experience with Versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0. I have seen the evolution. Version 3.0 is a major step forward. Of course, Versions 4.0 and 5.0 will be better as well. That's the way it works in software.

I've been in IT a long time, so I realize that by attending conferences, such as a recent one, it’s not just for the announcements. For me, it's more of a networking thing, shaking hands, and getting to know people. At these events, you can meet the developers and the product managers. It opens up doors so you can become more independent of that one phone number. It’s quite important knowing people.

If you do the networking, you feel that the service you get is top notch. You get even more service. It makes it easier to get to the second and third line of support because you know what you're talking about. You get more information than just the marketing fluff. I know what it's about because I'm able to communicate directly with the hardware and software guys and the product managers.

One of my things I do in my company is publish a technology blog which is quite technical for the type of audience that I have. OneView is a simple installation. My nine-year-old daughter can do it.

In my pre-sales role, I see other customers looking at competitive solutions, be it Intel, EMC, or Nutanix. They all have some strengths.

The Nutanix solution is cool, because it's simple. But it's software and I'm not convinced about any of the hardware underneath it. Some people say, "Yeah, the hardware's not important." However, I have some real-life scenarios, cases with customers, in which it was proven that they had the software, they had the hardware, but they had a hardware issue and the software screwed up.

I prefer to go for the HPE solution. This is not because Nutanix is bad, but they are just a software company, independent of the hardware. I feel more confident with HPE because I know they build the hardware and the software. If I have a problem, I can contact one person with one phone number and I can make contact. I know the hardware guy and I know the software guy.

With Nutanix, for instance, this is not the case. They also say, “we have one phone number," but if they have a problem with the rate controller in their server, they have to call Dell or Lenovo. They have to escalate the case. They are not going to be able to solve my problem. They are going to escalate it. I'm with HPE. I know that HPE will solve my problem directly.

You know all the good stuff and the not so good stuff about software, but OneView 3.0 is there now.

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.

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.

The single pane-of-glass and unified API allows you to handle everything from one single interface. The best thing about OneView is that you can manage rack mount servers, blades, and blade chassis, all from one single pane of glass.

It's helped in terms of monitoring, deployments, and being able to know what we have out there. We can actually integrate some of those features to manage things from afar, even from outside the data centers, as long as we have our onboard administrators configured correctly.

It works really well for basic day-to-day administrator functions without having to go into every single iLO, or every single detail for configuration.

It's really neat to be able to just slide in a new blade server, throw a blade profile on it through OneView, and that is all of the configuration that you need.

I can't think of anything off the top of my head for the next release. I think some of the stuff that's coming with Synergy is already going to be included there, like a lot of the OS integrations.

You can do some of that with Image Streamer and a Synergy chassis. A lot of those things go through OneView, which acts as its own Synergy composer, that takes you to the Image Streamer appliance. Those are their own OneView instances, so to speak.

The coming features I heard about at a recent conference are probably what I would have suggested anyway.

It's been stable so far. Once we got it up and running, we haven't had really any problems with it. We have a single-sign-on implementation for it. Once we got it hooked into our active directory, it has been very stable.

We actually have four, separate, isolated OneView instances with one master OneView on top of it. It's scaled very well so far, even from our initial smaller implementation. We have since scaled that, have experienced the scale, and it has worked really well.

I have not used technical support. I believe one of my cohorts has.

We knew that we needed to go to OneView when we started investing in the BladeSystem infrastructure. That's the best way to go when you're doing anything BladeSystem related.

I was not involved in the setup. My cohort was.

We did not look at other vendors.

When looking at vendors, I look at ease-of-use. Cost is always an important factor, as well as how it integrates with our environment and meets our regulatory requirements.

It is definitely worth it. You can have a single, unified instance to manage everything. It's great from a system admin's perspective. It's worth it.

I use HPE OneView HPE OneView to manage Synergy Switches in my company.

With HPE OneView, you can monitor a number of servers multiple times to see if they are stable.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the visibility it provides when one adds any other servers externally to it.

The speed and performance of the solution are areas where the product lacks and needs improvement.

I have been using HPE OneView for three or four months. I don't remember the version of the solution.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution's technical support was great.

The initial setup of HPE OneView was easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

I have seen a return on investment from the use of the solution in my company.

I feel the product's price falls a bit on the higher side.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it, especially those managing over twenty servers.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

Twice a year we do a server buy. We get in maybe 20 blade chassis. So, we would have a significant amount of servers to actually provision. We use OneView to change all the buyer settings, and it stops us having to go into each server and do it manually, which normally takes about ten minutes per server. However, we can just use OneView, do it all together, and have the whole thing setup and ready to be provisioned by the OS. 

That is what we use it for, and it is performing really well.

• The speed that we can provision servers
• The automatic case logging with HPE 

They are pretty good.

The most valuable thing is the speed, in which we can provision servers, and the remote support, which is automatically set up as well. The remote support automatically logs service calls and support cases with HPE, which is really good.

One thing which is missing is that you can't actually log a support call yourself. So, it's automatic, if a machine has gone wrong. However, sometimes it does not actually log a call for you, so it would be nice to actually be able to click "submit a case" within OneView instead of having to go out, login to Insight Remote Support's website and do it from there. That would be a good feature.

I know there is a new version (v.4), but we are using v.3.1, which is pretty stable. We have not had any downtime in our six months of use.

You can throw as many servers at it as you want. So, there is no problem there.

I have not used technical support yet.

We did not have a previous solution.

We needed a solution for a long time just to save time, because if you are doing 120 servers and having to go into each one, boot it up, wait for it to reboot, and change settings, then you might make mistakes if you are doing that many servers. So, just to have it all automated and being able to do it in one go, it is quite good. 

The initial setup was straightforward enough. You just need the VM, then load the software on and away it goes.

By myself; in-house.

Before looking into the solution, I was looking for something which could buy us changes, but at the time, HPE had some other solutions, but they were actually quite expensive to buy. So, when OneView came along, it was kind of reasonable in terms of price for licenses, etc.

No. We are a big HPE site. We use HPE SA and HPE OO for OS provisioning.

Go for it, because its ease of use and setting it up. Once setup, then it is more or less, forget about it. It just works away in the background.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: ease of use. If you are talking about an application like OneView, this was ease of use. The desktop and the dashboard are actually quite good. We have the dashboard up on a big screen, and you can actually see when things go wrong or if there are any faults with any of the servers. The backup is automated as well, so the appliance is quite good.

My company is a solution provider. Most of the company uses OneView because it is cloud-based management. Financial institutes and telcos mainly use OneView because it's cloud-based.

The solution is deployed on cloud and on-premises. It's a hybrid solution.

We have plans to increase the usage of HPE OneView in the future.

OneView provides a single console, which is manageable without physical access.

Integration could be improved. Sometimes OneView doesn't identify physical hardware.

I have used this solution for five years.

It's stable.

It isn't scalable, but there is multiple physical server integration.

Technical support is very good. There are teams in Singapore and Bangladesh.

Previously, we used a different solution. It wasn't single console management. Using physical, multiple servers and engineers is very complex from the customer's end.

Setup isn't complex. Initial setup is completed remotely.

If a customer has multiple servers, they will want OneView.

This license cost for OneView was $3,000 USD.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten. 

The solution is good for customers with multiple physical servers. Overall, the product is very good. The manageability feature is better than Cisco and Dell.