1. Home
  2. Blade Servers
  3. HPE BladeSystem Reviews
  4. User Review of HPE BladeSystem
BladeSystem provides user dense compute without compromise
September 27, 2017

BladeSystem provides user dense compute without compromise

Philip Sellers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HP ProLiant BladeSystem

HPE ProLiant Bladesystem is being used to support applications and virtualization across the entire organization. The blade infrastructure provided a very dense compute platform with flexibility to wire the system once and then move workloads between hosts easily.
  • Increase the density of compute with 16 servers in 10U of rack space.
  • Shares high-bandwidth uplinks to flexibly wire the fabric for the systems.
  • Provides the ability to migrate workloads between physical hardware easily with server profiles.
  • The small form factor of a blade server cannot accommodate expansion cards.
  • Shared infrastructure, like the interconnects, means a larger fault domain.
  • Firmware updates can be disruptive and administrators should pay close attention to firmware recipes and bundles to ensure compatibility between components.
  • 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.
BladeSystem provides a close experience to the UCS B-Series. UCS B-Series has a few capabilities within the network fabric that exceed what is capable on BladeSystem, but HPE has developed a lot of orchestration within HPE OneView to offer feature parity or even go beyond what is capable with UCS B-Series. The primary difference between the two is a compute centric (BladeSystem) versus a fabric centric (UCS) design. All administration is based around servers in BladeSystem versus the close ties to the fabric in UCS.
For general purpose Windows and ESXi hosts, the ProLiant BladeSystem works well for those use cases. The architecture is getting a bit dated, at over 10 years old, but the components have kept pace with processor and networking changes. Use cases that require local storage, hyper-converged and other specialty PCI cards are all no-goes for BladeSystem. In some cases, the HPE Synergy platform is a better fit for some of these use cases, although some constraints still exist even in that architecture.