OneView Synergy vs. OneView

[MCSAP]

Hi, can you settle a debate I have with a colleague?  Our group just got new Synergy 12000 enclosures and he is claiming they cannot be added to our existing HPE OneView appliances.

Is that accurate?  

[PatrickLong]

If by "added to our existing HPE OneView appliances" you mean existing OneView *virtual appliances, I'm afraid you owe your colleague a beverage.  Synergy 12000 enclosures and their installed compute modules, Frame Link Mondules, Interconnects, and VirtualConnects are managed via Synergy Composer - a physical hardware appliance installed into the appliance bay(s) of the enclosure whose sole purpose is to run Oneview for that environment.. Synergy Composer may be end of sale or near it at this point- new version Synergy Composer 2 provides updated hardware.

[MCSAP]

Thanks for the quick reply Patrick.

Why on Earth would HPE do that to their customers?  So we must support multiple versions of OneView now...one for rack mount and legacy C7000 (in our case 4 vAppliances) and now one for Synergy 12000?

[PatrickLong]

Since you're coming from a c7k perspective like I did, it may help to think of the OneView Composer hardware appliance sort of like an "OA on steroids " that performs OA functions but also so much more for the Synergy environment - I'm sure the HPE folks who pop their heads in here from time to time will not like that analogy but that's how I approached introducing Composers in my environment.   Except that instead of needing a pair of them per chassis like c7k,, a single pair of OneView Composers can manage up to 21 Synergy12000 frames and *all* the installed compute modules and other attendant hardware like VirtualConnects via a single management ring.  Vast reduction in uplinks and overall complexity among many other benefits. 

So yes, sadly you will need separate Oneview instances for your Synergy (via OneView Composer/Composer2) and non-Synergy (OneView vm appliance) like c7k and DL environments, but both flavors of OneView are not difficult to upgrade once installed, and you can have unified dashboard view and reporting using OneView Global dashboard, which is provided as yet another vm appliance that aggregates data from your OneView instances but is read only.