HPE BladeSystem is functional for standard Windows and ESXi host usage. Although the design is over a decade old, its parts are up to current with today's processors and networks. BladeSystem is not suitable for applications that necessitate local storage, hyper-converged, or any other type of specialized PCI cards. Some of these use cases are better suited to the HPE Synergy platform, however that design is not without its own limitations.
It is a robust and reliable machine and can be used in different scenarios. If you have a requirement for a high end physical server to host your organizations different online services then you can use ProLiant DL. It can also be used in an environment where there is a need to host multiple different virtual machines on two or more physical servers.
With upgrades to newer versions of VMware, HP has not provided VMware images with loaded drivers, this could be an issue for future upgrades to VMware users on HPs. The support forums discuss this and we wonder why no images are available.
Lilo support can be limited. These servers were preconfigured for us. HP was not able to help with this, telling us it must be in the preconfigured setup.
The base server did not meet our needs and the price ramped up quickly with add-ons to utilize SAN.
We do not intend to make new investments in HPE BladeSystem as it is in the end-of-life phase and we have continued with the new HPE Synergy environment. It is therefore not a process of discarding, but of evolution. This environment will possibly continue to be used in the institution, but for less critical purposes and more related to the development of new solutions.
Usability is generally good. I mostly like to use the management interface on HPE servers. GUI is well placed and provides easy access to management and reporting. Firmware upgrade is usually smooth, drivers install correctly and provide good quality of service. We have enough ports and interfaces to connect to the servers and some room to upgrade.
In over a decade, not once had we had a bad call with HPE support, not only were they have extremely qualified engineers but the speed in answering and addressing users is bar none. The same can not be said about support from other competitors in our experience over the years.
Incorporating HPE Blades Systems In order to house 16 physical servers, you just need 10 rack units instead of 32, which reduces the amount of heat produced and, in turn, the cost to cool the site. To have multiple Esx servers that can all be managed centrally, VMware virtualization is a must. HPE Blade Systems simplify the administration of several servers. You can develop pretty great projects with Onboard admin and Virtual connect. Virtualization is the best option.
I've used Dell poweredge servers and they were great too, but I found remotely deploying HPE hardware was significantly easier and faster. One thing I love about HPE is when i got to deploy an OS remotely via iLO I can utilize the virtual media URL as opposed to mounting an iso. these eliminates the SSL overhead and the OS can be deployed in under an hour. Mounting an ISO has proven reliable but due to the SSL overhead it can take hours. In addition i found im able to register my HPE hardware with HPE and they provide me a clean IT dashboard of all of my hardware and they give me alerts as to expiring support coverage, if a server is down or reporting an error. its a very solid and reliable solution all around.
The number of ports required for connectivity to 16 physical server is reduced with BladeSystem, without compromising flexibility - so there is a 16x savings on the number of ports required on physical switching infrastructure.
In-place upgrades to newer hardware are accommodated by virtualized MAC addresses and WWN's in the fabric of the BladeSystem.
On a couple occasions, large scale outages have affected the environment because of an issue at the core of BladeSystem. Users should be aware of the fault domain caused by a single chassis and plan accordingly. Our issues were mitigated due to a second, separate chassis where we spread workloads.
They last forever. We only replace them when newer versions of VMWare don't support our oldest models. Our refresh cycle on virtual hosts is 6 or 7 years.
Plenty of third-party service support available when the warranty is up. This helps extend the life cycle as well.
