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HP has announced the latest version of its intended all encompassing converged infrastructure management application HP OneView. HP plans to ship this in the autumn(no specific date mentioned)

OneView was built initially to support the configuration of HPs version of the Vblock, the ConvergedSystem 300s and 700s. This has extended to be able to manage blade systems and 3PAR storage, The December 2014 1.2 release added a standard version so you could monitor any HP G6-Gen9 servers for free without having any of the configuration options. There is still a “tax” to upgrade your existing HP iLO Advanced license to a full management included OneView license but HP is looking into this. Make your feelings heard loud and clear that HP shouldn’t be charging extra on top of extra to manage their own hardware.

HP is putting a lot of effort into OneView. At HP Discover every infrastructure component is managed via OneView. This is from Hyper-Converged, stand alone blade chassis to Converged Systems. They have plans to extend this into HP and now Arista networking.  HP has a whole new initiative called “Composable Infrastructure” which I will go into in more detail in a future post but this is all about Infrastructure as Code with using OneView with a single API call to create physical infrastructure from automation tools like Chef, Puppet etc.

So, what’s new:

There are now (at last) templates which means you can create a master server profile, use it as a template and very quickly use that template to configure blade server profiles, provision storage, manage BIOS setting as well as firmware.

They are now adding driver management into OneView in addition to firmware updates.

There is simplified storage monitoring and troubleshooting.

HP has also created a new add-on for OneView called HP Virtualisation Performance Viewer which is a separately licensed product built on top of OneView. This takes the smartsfrom HP Vertica’s Big Data analytics tool and brings it to OneView. This will allow you to analyse and optimise virtualisation clusters, do what-if capacity analysis and increase your utilisation and performance by doing some trending analysis. Yes, as expected lots of analysis.

I then asked about the current issue with OneView which is seriously impeding adoption so you have to blow away your Virtual Connect configuration which means shutting down every VM and blade in your chassis and convert over the config, a ludicrous situation meaning no-one uses the benefits of management with OneView as they can’t manage the downtime to do it. HP say they have solved this! Although I am super-excited about this development I reserve judgement until I actually see it as it just seems too good to be true!

I want to like OneView and I certainly want to use it but there are just too many chassis out there that can’t be shut down so people are left with the utter shambles that is HP SIM.

HP paid for travel and accommodation to attend HP Discover but didn’t pay a penny for me to write anything good or bad about them.