HPE StoreVirtual Reviews

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.

Running a SAN without having to invest in additional expensive hardware so this means we have a cost saving. It also means that less support is needed as there is less hardware to maintain. Also, it has Adaptive Optimization which means it is using fast storage (SSD) only for active data.

In the past we didn’t have a shared storage solution in small offices; with StoreVirtual, we can benefit from the advantages of a SAN (vMotion, HA, DRS etc.) without investing big money.

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.

We've been using it for six months. It's installed on a VMware vSphere instance (v12.6.00.01155.0) with two storages nodes that each have a 10TB license and a failover manager for quorum.

We had some stability issues in the beginning. They were easily resolved by dedicating a NIC for symmetric replication.

We haven't yet had to contact tech support.

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.

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

We also considered VMware VSAN because of its integration with the hypervisor/console. We decided to go for the HP solution because of the stability of the product as the OS, LeftHand, is already fairly old and well established, so HP have more experience there.

Before implementing it and using it you should read the best practice documents as well as white papers upfront.

That my team can manage it. The server guys can actually manage the storage on their own. It was easy for them to learn to use the console and provision the storage quickly.

It was a long, painful process to get storage from the storage team and having to go through a lot of paperwork and processes, where now we can do it on our own quickly and as needed.

It's easy to set up, easy for my team to manage, the tools are pretty easy to learn, and it's important for us to be able to provision storage quickly in my environment, so as soon as we get a new node in, we can get it up and running very quickly, provision it, immediately use the storage.

The only issue that we have, occasionally, is bonding the NICs sometimes is problematic. It could be our environment. We have the Cisco Nexus infrastructure, and sometimes the nodes just don't want to bind. We have all kinds of problems with it, and we have to call a ticket in, and the product guys to help us figure out what's going on. It happens occasionally, it's not like, every time, it's just every once in 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.

Latency is one of the things that our vROPs all the time, complains about the latency for that environment. We don't have good visibility to find out what's really causing it, what's underneath the problem. That's kind of been a sticking point that we're going to look into, but definitely vROPs are always complaining about latency from the StoreVirtual LUNs.

Scalability is one of the reasons why we got it. Now, there is a limitation on how many nodes you can have on each measurement cluster, so we have to kind of figure that out - what the best number is to have on each one.

We've had challenges, especially with opening tickets. Waiting for someone to get back to us can be a huge amount of time. We do have proactive services, so sometimes I have to pull those guys in to help escalate a ticket just to get some attention to 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.

We did go through an evaluation process. It was quite a few years ago. There was definitely competitors to StoreVirtual, actually, it was LeftHand at the time, when we made the decision to go with the product. We've stuck with it since and nothing has come up that has challenged that to make us rethink yet. There was definitely Dell, and as it was a number of years ago, I can't think of any other.

It wasn't EMC, but I think it was a NetApp product, because they do iSCSI as well, but again, then that would fall back onto the storage team and we want it to kind of stay away from that.

I would say, number one spend time to understand the product, to get the proper training or the people involved when you bring it in. Make sure it's the right product for what you're trying to solve. It's not a take care of any type of storage problem, there's no specific use cases that you want that it's good for.

Like I said, for the virtual environment, it does great for VMware, Hyper-V, whatever you want to use that type of storage for. Then it's just quick, easy storage if you need it for a file server, it would be good for that. You wouldn't want to use it for a cluster or a high I/O thing, but for the virtual environment and storage that's not dependent on high I/O, it would be a good fit.

Easy and cheap High Availability is most valuable for us. Also, the VSA (virtual appliance) version enables us to reuse already installed hardware. You do not need to worry about RAID and components anymore, because even a whole chassis loss does not stop this product.

We are able to build server clusters without external storage and still provide high availability. We are able to run the VSA version inside the actual servers, thus converging server and storage in same units.

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

We have been using StoreVirtual solutions since 2010 when it was known as LeftHand.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues scaling it.

Customer service is outstanding.

Technical support is excellent.

We have used many monolithic and traditional storage systems and all proved to not be highly available with single units. However, StoreVirtual can be split into two, providing you the benefit of redundant active data centers without doubling the cost.

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.

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

ROI usually takes about a year.

If you think about high availability the product is very cheap because it is an all inclusive offering. You need to buy licenses and two of traditional products compared to StoreVirtual.

The VSA version is free for every brand server up to 1TB/node up to three nodes. There is also a 60 day trial for more than 1TB storage. You just need the license key to continue managing the product without reinstalling if you purchase it.

It is the only product that provides High Availability without depending on OS multipath I/O. It looks like a single unit from the outside, thus there is no need for failover/failback because all nodes are active. It is like a metro train compared to a classic diesel train, meaning it has an engine in every car. Adding capacity means adding performance because you are adding controllers, too. We can’t say it is the fastest product on the planet, but it is definitely not slow. High Availability means synchronized replication over the network, adding a little latency but providing High Availability.

Since it is IP-based, it is important to make sure a network problem does not result in the collapse of storage network. It is best to have redundant switches that do not share the same network as applications. VLANS are definitely recommended.

Pay attention to the managers running and make sure your failover manager is not bound to any nodes. A failover manager needs to be alive for smaller clusters to survive complete hardware/network failures. Make sure there is no single point of failure that would result in multiple nodes going down.

StoreVirtual has been real good for us. We started with the original P4300 LeftHand SANs before they became StoreVirtual. What I love about those is the two nodes and the mirroring back and forth, and you can't lose anything. It's very solid, and we haven't really had any trouble with those either. We have a newer StoreVirtual that we've connected to one of the C3000 Blade Enclosures and it runs well. We lost a system board once and we lost a couple of servers, but we were able to bring everything back. Equipment-wise, it allows us to do all our work. We're real happy with that.

The things we like best about it is just that it's safe, it's reliable, it's easy to transfer data back and forth, it's easy to replicate elsewhere. We've been very happy with them.

Outside of the one incident on the StoreVirtual where we lost the system board which was a little tough. If the guy who came out to replace it knew what he was doing and put the right firmware on, then we wouldn't have lost any virtual servers. But beyond that, the other ones have been very good and we've been really happy there.

It's been hit and miss. I guess there's some guys in Texas or Houston that we've been able to get a hold of who know their stuff and it's like a different group, the LeftHand people. They know their things inside and out, and usually are able to steer us right to what we need, so we've been real happy there.

We'd seen a couple of lunch and learns and meetings and talked to some of the LeftHand people, and decided it made sense cost-wise and function-wise. We were using some Dell EqualLogics, actually we were using EqualLogic before Dell bought them. So we were still using those in conjunction with the LeftHands that then became StoreVirtuals. Then when we put in one of the C3000 BladeEnclosures, we bought an actual StoreVirtual and that gave us the space to run the servers that we need.

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.

I had a guy from EMC call me once and his whole sales pitch was, "Well, we've got the biggest marketshare." And I told him, "That's a load of crap." Our deal is, we can't afford that stuff, and we don't want it. Even if Dell's got them now, we still don't want it. One of the things that we really love about HPE in all phases is the ability to continue maintenance, to continue coverage. Where we got the word from Dell that five years after the day you bought your EquaLogic you're out of luck. We won't sell you anything, we won't sell you parts, we won't sell you ... and we're like, "Okay, we won't buy your stuff." And we haven't. We got real close on 3PARs, we may still do that again, but we went a different direction. But, you know, "Treat us fair and we'll buy." That's what we love about HP, we really have no complaints.

It was a recommendation from the vendor that we said, "This is solid." When we first bought them, we'd actually gone two or three HP events and listened to the whole talk of, "Here's how, what it's put together, here's how it works." So, that's kind of what lead to it, was that we pretty much just said, "Okay, we'll trust you. Let's go with it." And we've been happy.

I don't think we'd have any good reasons to go elsewhere. In fact we have done that. We were talking to a guy from city of Carson City, and he was having some server issues and so we hooked him up with our vendor, and they took him out of the Dells he had, and gave him some HPs and he's been very happy ever since.

• Hardware stability
• Support
• Four-hour response support
• Performance

Using this platform, we were able to provide virtual desktops (VDI) to our end users across WAN, to help alleviate some of the problems that we’ve had with bandwidth.

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

The product has been in place for four months.

No issues with deployment.

No, the hardware has been good, and the system runs at a pretty low-temperature. We have ordered additional RAM as we need more.

Not yet. We haven’t made that jump yet, but in a few months we may add additional nodes. It seems simple enough to add additional nodes.

10/10.

10/10. They have experienced technical staff and work through the problems. They're very helpful.

This was our first HyperConverged solution.

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.

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.

It takes about two years.

The initial install cost is expensive, but eventually the cost per user is quite reasonable. The more you scale out, the faster it drops. The original cost per user was $971 for 500 users. The cost goes down to $594, and after 3,000 users, it goes down to $401.

Three of the four solutions we researched were HyperConverged solutions, and there wasn’t the same support and cost as we had from HP. HP was the best for cost savings per performance, year over year. We looked at three other solutions though for our RFP, and we selected HP. We evaluated the cost per user once you scale out.

On the software side of things, we’ve had issues with printers. We have a complicated situation on the user side of things too. We were able to get through the issues and limitations by using PowerShell scripting. Having IT resources in-house is a must for more complicated cases.

While it's a simple system to work with, at the same time it gives a high level of data availability and resilience. We can utilize our existing hardware and save energy in cooling costs.

HP StoreVirtual added the benefits of a shared storage to a highly-virtualized environment:

• Live migration
• High availability
• Data protection (snapshots)
• Better performance

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

We have used this product since 2010.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have had no stability issues.

When it was deployed, we were just building our VM environment, and it's scaled out as our needs grew. We've had no issues with being unable to scale.

Customer service is brilliant.

Technical support is brilliant. HP technical support is great for sorting out the little issues as they arise.

We did not use a different solution. We chose StoreVirtual as it ticked many boxes in regards to our needs.

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

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

I would estimate our ROI to be somewhere around 600%.

It’s a good, solid product. Make sure you get the HP care pack as you need it to access updates. If you can’t fit in your budget a hardware SAN, this is a good alternative.