lets discuss HPE support responsibilities for simplivity installations

[Alganatay]

In my opinion, as a Hyper Converged Infrastructure  simplivity should handle single point of upgrade with tested and supported versions. aligned with this idea HPE provides simplivity upgrade manager which is used to upgrade omnistack software, simplivity firmware as well as esxi installations. This also works with other HCI vendors, such as vxrail, nutanix etc.

However, a contrary incident had happened which put me in doubt about HPE's vision of HCI support. 

In one of my customers, we tried to use upgrade manager to upgrade omnistack software, firmware and esxi version. At the last step esxi upgrade failed and upgrade manager clearly suggested to create a support case. So we proceed as suggested. 

A week after we created the support case, an email has returned suggesting that vmware issues are not covered in simplivity support and we should not use upgrade manager and use alternate methods to upgrade esxi.  Am I missing something here? Vmware is provided as a part of simplivity set, which is OEM version. It has been bought through HPE sales channel, activation has been performed over HPE enterprise software channel. However support is not responsible for upgrade issues.

Can anybody speculate about the legitimacy of this proposal? Should a customer wait for vmware support in such a scenario?

Cheer 

Gokhan

[gustenar]

Hello @Alganatay, 

Using Upgrade Manager for software updates including ESXi is completely fine and commonly used when installing custom packages included in the software update bundle. Other security patches may need to be installed following normal Vmware procedures. Simplivity can assist identifying what the issue is, but there may be situations in which our software isn't the problem, and it is necessary to engage resources from Vmware side.  

[Alganatay]

Hello @gustenar 

Thank you for the answer. I completely agree with you about the role of HPE on the subject. What I want to mention is, there should be a cutoff limit where HPE support will forward or redirect case to the vendors (in this case vmware) service desk or at least inform the user about the inability to proceed any further. 

In our case HPE support staff reject to handle the case at all. However, our current situation at the time of case creation was only a mainstream esxi upgrade which includes no fancy security patch or else.

I want to emphasize the importance of customer confidence on simplivity ecosystem. If they know that hpe is the only contact point in any case this would make hci usage valuable. Otherwise, there won't be any difference between conventional system that is build from the ground up and a simplivity environment.. 

cheers,

Gokhan

[gustenar]

Thank you for the feedback Gokhan.