HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

The biggest thing about it is the LeftHand OS. One of the key features about it is that when you buy either a VSA license or a StoreVirtual appliance, all your software's included. You're not adding parts and pieces. Again, you can expand the hyper-converged storage, which actually used VSA in it for the storage part of it, by just adding, so that increases your capacity and your performance. The other thing about StoreVirtual is that it is our software-defined solution and it's everywhere. It's in Synergy. It's in our StoreOnce. It's in our hyper-converged solutions and again now, it's by itself.

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.

LeftHand OS has been around forever, and it's a proven product, and it's easy to use.

We use a lot of StoreVirtual to replicate the customer's environment, two or three different sites, and it's quick and easy to use. The interface and the installation makes it easy as it's all in one piece of hardware and it doesn't need to be connected to anything else.

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

It's very stable and I don't remember the last time that it was unavailable. We have the occasional disk failure, but that doesn't stop it from working.

I don't know the limits, but we can support all our customers with StoreVirtual.

In Brazil, the response time is a little slow. Our contract says six hours, but sometimes the response has been 10 hours, or even 12, so, that's not good. Once you get hold of them, they're good.

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

The prices are OK, so we don't have much difficulty selling HPE in Brazil.

We perform an analysis of the customer scenario and needs, and then we suggest a product, but we only sell HPE. The decision is which HPE product they need.

We originally had LeftHand which are morphing into StoreVirtual. We use it in our remote offices and don’t have many issues with it. We are currently collapsing everything down into a DL380.

The StoreVirtual is rather new for us. We're still in the process of making a homegrown hyper-convergence system with the StoreVirtual product.

The LeftHands themselves have been very stable. We're moving to the VSA on the DL380s.

We aren’t sure of the scalability yet but are aiming to find out soon.

HPE support is very good. I've never had an issue with it. HPE stands behind their product so they work hard to fix issues.

I would also advise that users follow best practices with the StoreVirtual.

To pick a solution, we generally create a matrix and then fill in what we want out of the product. We pump in vendors and choose whoever meets the targets that we set.

It gives us what we want. It provides stability and availability. It is a very reliable solution.

The network RAID feature gives us maximum availability, since we cannot afford any downtime, even for a second. We need our systems continuously up.

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.

Now, we're not afraid of anything that goes wrong.

We didn't have any problems. We scaled up a few years ago; the system was just fine.

We have used the technical support only for faulty replacements such as replacement of disks, for example. The contract was for the next business day. It was fine.

We were not using any other solution previously. Our partner suggested this product; we saw that it fits our needs and tried it out. We were quite pleased with the result and decided to invest in this solution.

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

If this solution fits your needs and also if your environment is similar to ours, then we would suggest this solution.

The factors that we look at while selecting a vendor are that they should be innovative, provide a good support option and have reliable products. I don't want my product to fail.

The HPE StoreVirtual Network RAID-10 (mirroring between nodes) is the most valuable feature. This allows for multi-node redundancy. If one node fails, the other in the cluster picks up the entire load. I have had nodes fail due to upgrade and other issues with no loss of data. Resync is automatic as is failover. For a 3 node system you do need an independent failover manager, but that is normal for clusters.

I administer a 100% virtual environment. To use the HPE StoreVirtual VSA edition, I did not have to buy an expensive external array. I was able to create two 3.27TB usable HPE VSAs from all the older disks I had laying around. Granted, eventually, I did purchase two storage blades to be used by the VSA, but that is not how usage started. Recently, I have been using HPE StoreVirtual on KVM as well.

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.

Since version 8.5 or 3+ years. I have gone through many upgrades and am now at the latest.

HPE StoreVirtual is quite stable, except for the login issues, but only if you have at least 2 nodes. Built-in redundancy for Network RAID-10 mode is very stable.

My environment grows with me; I can expand it up to 10 TBs before I have to re-license. In addition, it is possible to build an all flash version of HPE StoreVirtual. One of these days, I look forward to doing just that.

When I have a problem, I will call support; I've called support once. It was really not a StoreVirtual problem as much as it was a management console problem, and they solved it fairly quickly.

Actually, at the time of my initial use, I did try building my own iSCSI server (I still have that running actually) but HPE StoreVirtual has many more features and works for me. Today, I also have VMware VSAN, HPE StoreVirtual, and even a fibre channel array. I have had a fibre channel infrastructure for well over 12 years. I needed an iSCSI environment as well. This was the best option at the time and today is a core part of my virtual environment.

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.

Be sure to get 2-nodes for redundancy. Licensing changes at the 10TB mark.

I run a 100% vSphere environment, and KVM. I actually built my own iSCSI server that was for ESXi and I used it to upgrade all my SANs. I have a SAN, as well - a fibre channel SAN - and when I upgrade that, I've upgraded it three times; it's a rip and replace, and the other one was rip and replace all the drives. I just moved everything to my local iSCSI server, but that was unstable.

The management console could be a lot better, as it's got a little clunky feeling. It needs a lot of work on some parts of it, and on the integration with the components that I need inside of the vSphere environment and the KVM environment. It's there, but it's a little antiquated. There are some things coming out that I heard about at HPE Discover that will make my life a lot easier. I'm likely going to upgrade some of it in pieces again, so I don't lose my redundancy.

Check it out. The redundancy is there. The real thing is to make sure you know what you're buying. If you buy any VSA by any company out there, it's tied to a single piece of hardware. Now, you can move it around by doing storage vMotion, but if you have 3 TB, then you need 3 TB free somewhere else. That doesn't move fast, so the idea is to do redundancy and to build that in. To bake that in and build that into your costing model and to plan that. Either do it upfront or plan to do it eventually. That means a minimum of 2 nodes plus a fail over manager.

Shelf level-redundancy is one of the big things that StoreVirtual has had before some other SAN manufacturer or SAN model brands, which is pretty nice. It can be rather expensive because you are much less efficient when you have that redundancy, but it's definitely a benefit if you really need access to that data. You can't have it go down ever. That's definitely a benefit if you're willing to pay for it I guess.

It's fairly intuitive, and a fat client, so you install it on Windows. It works.

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.

I no longer work on those products as of a year ago. If something's changed within that time, I don't know.

I haven't had problems with it.

The systems that I've installed haven't been gigantic. I know that it's supposed to scale pretty large. With each additional node that you add, you're adding additional horsepower, different things. That's another nice benefit to it, rather than just adding a disc shelf that has one or two heads, you're adding additional CPU and memory to go along with each one.

There was only one time I did have to contact them, and they got the issue fixed.

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.

Initially it can come out cheaper than 3PAR depending on how you grow it. You can add some redundancy in there that eventually, depending on which I guess type of 3PAR you're going with and whatnot, the StoreVirtual could do from what I've heard. I did mostly post-sales rather than pre-sale stuffs. It can become quite expensive and even become more expensive than some of the 3PARs. It's sixes now probably what you can get into it for price wise. It just depends once you get down the line performance wise.

We do 3PAR. That's another HP product that's really nice and solid. That's what we sell more of than even StoreVirtual.

The product's fine, but the fact it doesn't have dedicated management is a big thing to me.

We were primarily looking for a storage system for a management cluster that was separate from our fiber channel SAN. Fiber channel SAN is all of our mission critical stuff, but we needed somewhere for our management systems that are watching and monitoring everything. So we were looking for something that was ASCII based. We wanted something that wasn't going to take pre-built hardware because we have two different data centers and a third location where we are trying to spread the data across those locations. The VSA solution was great because it runs on ProLiant alongside of our ESX servers and we were able to get that geographic disbursement of our data while watching our mission critical fiber stuff. It's simple to administer too and it was simple to set up.

We leveraged StoreVirtual to provide a software SAN for our management cluster of vSphere - this allowed us to run monitoring and management applications on a separate infrastructure from the rest of our Fibre Channel based vSphere clusters and allowed us to watch and observe, even when the SAN was having a problem.  

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.  

We've got about four years worth of experience with it.

Sizing information is scarce to know how to size drives and which types of drives to use.  Different engineers in HPE have different opinions how to deploy the solution.  Using VMDK disks under the StoreVirtual for its primary storage caused a lot of low disk space errors in vSphere on the VMFS drives, so either you leave a lot of space unused to avoid errors or you deploy it onto RDM's with local disks (which takes some extra configuration).  

StoreVirtual has been great. We haven't had a failure in all the years I have run it, and we went through a reconfiguration about three months ago to add some solid state drives to improve the performance, and it works fantastic.  

The great thing about that is if we are hitting a performance issue or something, scale is built into that platform, you add additional nodes, you've got additional capacity, you've got additional IOP capabilities across your virtual array. So scaling within StoreVirtual is really kind of easy, just scale it out to another node. The trick, however, is each node really needs to be configured the same as the last - so mix and match in the future with new technology becomes more of an issue.  

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.

Pricing is very affordable - it is great for SMB on up to Enterprise looking for branch solutions.  Purpose built-appliances are also available for those looking for more scale.  

StoreVirtual isn't going to be a jack-rabbit - it isn't going to be the best performing SDS you find on the market, but it is most the most affordable and it suits many use cases.  

• The ability to scale out if/when additional capacity is required.
• The ability to migrate data between clusters within the same management group.

It hasn't helped as the HP provided software for the host server systems has become a continuous nightmare when it comes to HP LH OS upgrade process with our 260+ systems in multiple management groups/clusters.

• 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.

~6 years.

There have been no issue with the deployment.

We have had numerous issues with the stability that have been enumerated above.

We have had no issues scaling it although upgrading a management group with more than 10 nodes can turn into a reboot nightmare...if the reboot even resolves the bug(s)/issue(s).

Just OK...especially if you should be unlucky enough to have a set of P4800 (blade-based)

It's 8/10 once we escalate past Tier One, and sometimes even Tier Two.

We were previously using NetApp for block-based storage requirements. HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) was selected due to the lower initial purchase (CapEx) and subsequent support (OpEx) costs.

It was reasonably straightforward.

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.

We have not officially calculated the exact ROI.

There's no advice about pricing/licensing as we handle it via an HP VAR, with a contract established with YP, that provides very good pricing/licensing numbers.

NetApp.

My advice is to only use HP StoreVirtual (LeftHand) for small-scale and/or per-project deployments via iSCSI (IPSAN) preferably on dedicated network between the host server and the storage systems.