Betreff: Thoughts on HP Simplivity?

[gyanmlila]

Just wondering has any experience with running HP Simplivity. We are looking for a new On-Prem Server/Storage Infrastructure. We are a medium size business with a small IT team, so going HCI is advantageous as there is less points of contact to manage.

Recently, we’ve seen the flashy HP Marking PowerPoint Presentation for Simplivity, it sure does look nice! However, I’m just wondering what the “Gotchya’s” / Trade-off are for Simplivity? The price also looks too go to be true (as if they are trying to undercut their way into the market).

We’d be looking at running 2x densely packed nodes (HP), so we would save a lot on vmware licensing compared to our old setup of several compute nodes.

• It used to be the HW PCI Accelerator Card that a lot of people on sysdamin complained about, but I think they have since fixed this.

• Another common complaint is regarding all the plugins for vmware. They seem to be overly complex and break often?

• How is HP Support with Simplivity? I’d rather not talk to a guy reading off a script from an overseas call-center every time we have a problem.

• I’m just worried that every time the HP giant consumes another company (3par, Nimble, Simplivity) they all seem to get shelved and die off within 1-2 years.

If anyone could share their experience with Simplivity, that would be great. Thanks

[ICPMuenchen]

@gyanmlila 

we are using the Simplivity System over 4 years now. We are having a medium size stretched 2 node cluster, which is really amazing. round about 70 VMs and this year we extended with 2 compute nodes (running out of cpu capacity). Our IT is also very small and we dont need a lot of storage space.

before we had a datacore sansymphony storage (3 vmware nodes - 2 storage nodes) with simplivity we saved 3 servers. we also checked different competitors like nutanix, vxrail etc, which are amazing too, but for a stretched cluster you need at least 3 nodes per side, so this would have been 6 servers in our scenario. so with simplivity we saved a lot of licenes , rack space, power, server administration, etc.

there also had been times, where we didnt log in into vcenter for severeal weeks/month. it really just runs!! in the past 4 years, we only had some disks which needed to be replaced. this was due to a faulty firmware in the controller/disks. but with HPE direct connet the ticket was opend automatically and the new disks have been there very quick.

- the HW PCI Card is very reliable, we didnt had any outages

- the plugins for vmware, btw. its only one plugin (simplivity vsphere plugin) works without any problem. there was just one problem a few month ago, which was fixed quite fast.

- HPE Support is great, and always fast in responding. When creating a ticket, just upload a support bundle so they can analyzie in advance and you will get a very professional technican

- simplivity is available for years now, and also part of HPE Greenlake, in my opinion there is no reason why they should replace it. 

However, where there is light, there is also "shadow":
- you need a third machine for running the HPE Arbiter Service (Witness Service) this can be a small server/pc or also a virtual machine on a remote site.

- VM disks should be formatted with at least 8k cluster size. disks with bigger files (database etc.) with 64k for best performance/compress/dedupe ratio. so you need to change that, when migrating vms from your old environment. but there are tools for this.

- simplivity storage will be mounted as nfs3 storage to vmware/nodes - hence there is no automatic space reclamation. you will have to zero out your vms/disk manually or via scheduled tasks, to free up storage space.

i neither work for HPE nor i am getting paid for this, i am just a happy customer.
if you would ask me, if i would buy simplivitiy again? Yes definitely! It makes the most sense in OUR scenario/environment.