HP DL servers run our environment
February 28, 2019
HP DL servers run our environment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HPE ProLiant DL
We have always used HP Proliant DL servers in this organization. We use them for AD Domain controllers and file servers. This goes back to when these were used as physical Windows Servers running everything from Server 2003 to Server 2008 R2, these were DL160 and 180 G6. In the last 4 years, we purchased 3 new Proliant Dl 360p servers to run VMware. These only have flash drives installed to run VMware on them. These are connected to a SAN which houses our Virtualized Servers. As some of these older servers have legacy software on them, we virtualized all-out physical servers and now run a totally virtualized environment.
- Runs VMware well, these have been very reliable.
- We were also able to expand our storage by adding hard drives to these servers and that integrates well with VMware.
- HP support has helped us maintain these and been able to provide extended parts availability.
- With upgrades to newer versions of VMware, HP has not provided VMware images with loaded drivers, this could be an issue for future upgrades to VMware users on HPs. The support forums discuss this and we wonder why no images are available.
- Lilo support can be limited. These servers were preconfigured for us. HP was not able to help with this, telling us it must be in the preconfigured setup.
- The base server did not meet our needs and the price ramped up quickly with add-ons to utilize SAN.
- Allowed us to move forward with running web-based applications and to scale them as needed.
- The lack of future driver support has made it difficult to consider upgrades, we may need to go with more expensive hardware in the future to be able to maintain upgrades.
- While we have not realized all the business growth benefits we expected from this investment, we have had much more flexibility and options when we need to change our environment to meet the business needs.
These are complementary products, our HP servers running VMware connect to the Nimble SAN for storage and these work great together, it's like one big machine consisting of the VMware HP servers and the Nimble SAN (now owned by HPE). we run 10GB connections between these devices and they have no lag or other issues for the workload we have in place.