HPE BladeSystem is a brand of blade server, from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HPE blades include the ProLiant BL series and the ProLiant WS series.
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HPE Synergy
Score 10.0 out of 10
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HPE Synergy is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's software designed to support a composable infrastructure, which treats IT resources as a service that can be "composed" and deployed out to applications in near real-time, eliminating the need to configure hardware.
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.
Firmware repository size limitations could be larger (was increased recently but still is only room for a few SPPs)
Profile template updates flag all machines that haven't had their profile updated from the template, causing the dashboard to go red with warnings and can cause unnecessary concern
OneView, while powerful isn't as user friendly as it could be
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.
The hardware has fulfilled all of the promises that it made when we first acquired it. The only thing that would preclude this would be if the organization decided to holistically switch hardware vendors for reasons other than performance and feature sets.
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.
While all similar offerings can achieve basically the same thing, HPE Synergy stands out against Cisco and Dell offerings with respect to manageability, ease of use and flexibility - HPE Synergy offers configurations groups of chassis to create logical enclosures that can be managed as a single entity and also blades in any slot can be plumbed and allocated as necessary to multiple uplinks. This is one level more flexible than the others which limits configurations of blades in a single chassis to similar uplink settings. Also, the HPE Synergy chassis itself supports 12 blades vs 10 in competitive offerings.
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.
Eased concerns for go-live of a huge new deployment as we knew we could respond to any scaling concern swiftly and thoroughly
Hardware has been rock solid since implementation
Limits to initially deployed logical enclosure configurations have been addressed rapidly by the introduction of new hardware with fast speeds/additional management ring connectivity options
