HP Recently announced OneView which looks to be poised to manage their converged infrastructure, and datacenter products.  As the name might suggest it can be used to manage all your HP products from one console.  One of the things that grabbed me was that it is deployed to a vSphere environment with an OVA file which makes it super easy to deploy.  In the past some of the HP Management tools like Insight Control required a whole slew of prerequisites before the product could actually be installed.  Once that was installed, there was a tedious process of configuring it with all of your network devices and if you didn’t configure them in the right order, they wouldn’t relate to each other correctly.

If you’d like to read more about this please check out Luigi Tiano’s post as well as Chris Wahl’s post about it.

I installed HP Oneview in a semi-lab environment to test it out.  It’s true, my home lab does not include a C7000 blade chassis (well, not yet anyway). The install was a breeze and the interface seemed very responsive and nicely laid out.

Unfortunately this is about where my tests ended.  My first configuration item was going to be my HP Onboard Administrator on the C7000 Blade Chassis.  In the past with ICE, the Onboard Administrator (OA) needed to be discovered first and then the blades and interconnects afterwards.  But when I discovered the Onboard Administrator, I got a troubling message.

In the screenshot below, you’ll notice that is says the Enclosure is already claimed by another management system.  The IP Address it mentions is the HP Virtual Connect Interconnect Modules!  Ok, that sort of makes sense, the HP Virtual Connect modules manage the networking of the blade chassis.  It gives me the option to force the install, so I did.

I click the nicely placed “Learn more…” link which takes you to the help files.

On the next screen, my concerns are realized.  HP OneView wants to be the management point for my blade enclosure and Virtual Connect Networking.  This is where I canceled out of the configuration.  As you can see, you are asked to configure uplinks to manage the Virtual Connect domain and Enclosure.

If you’ve decided to migrate your own Virtual Connect Manager over to OneView the following document might help.

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx%2F4AA5-0351ENW.pdf

Final Thoughts

So from what I can tell, HP OneView could be a really great tool to manage a the datacenter, but it concerned me a bit that management is being taken away from my Virtual Connect Manager.  In my situation (and many of my customers) they would have the OneView Appliance deployed in their vSphere environment that is run on the HP Blades that it is managing.  If there is a serious issue that brings down the enclosure, you might lose access to the appliance that would allow you to troubleshoot the enclosure.  If there is a machine outside of the blade enclosure that is running OneView, this changes things significantly and I’d be on board with deploying OneView.  This product looks promising and I think will have a place in the datacenter but for right now I’m going to stick with my Virtual Connect Manager and Onboard Administrator to configure my blade chassis since it’s the only server infrastructure in my environment at the moment.

REQUESTS FOR COMMENT

Obviously this was a truncated test in my semi-test lab and would love to get some feedback from anyone with OneView experience or an HP Engineer to discuss this further.