Yesterday I was informed by the EVO:RAIL team that the HP ConvergedSystem 200–HC EVO:RAIL is available (shipping) as of this week. I haven’t seen much around additional pieces HP is including, but I was told though that they are planning to integrate HP One View. HP One View is a management/monitoring solution that gives you a great high level overview of the state of your systems but at the same time enables you to dive deep when required. Depending on the version included HP One View can also do things like Firmware Management, which is very useful in a Virtual SAN environment if you ask me. I know though that many people have been waiting for HP to start shipping as it appears to be a preferred vendor for many customers. In terms of configuration, the HP solution is very much similar to what we have already seen out there:
- 4 nodes in 2U each containing:
- 2 x Intel® E5-2620 v2 six-core CPUs
- 192 GB memory
- 1 x SAS 300 GB 10k rpm drive ESXi boot device
- 3 x SAS 1.2 TB 10k rpm drive (VSAN capacity tier)
- 1 x 400 GB MLC enterprise-grade SSD (VSAN performance tier)
- 1 x H220 host bus adapter (HBA) pass-through controller
- 2 x 10GbE NIC ports
- 1 x 1GbE IPMI port for remote (out-of-band) management
As soon as I find out more around integration of other components I will let you folks know.
Calvin Zito says
(Disclosure: I work for HP Storage)
As of now, OneView is not integrated with the HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL. Plans are that it will be but can’t give any timing information. Personally, I think HP should be a top consideration for any EVO:RAIL deployment as HP has over 1200 certified VMware professionals and is the number one vendor for virtualization with VMware.
The HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual which has storage based on StoreVirtual VSA does have OneView integration with deeper integration coming over time. This solution has a couple of different flavors (performance or capacity optimized) and I did a video walk-through of the it on this video: http://youtu.be/euHgJsZ-nK4
There are a few posts on my blog that go deeper: http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Around-the-Storage-Block-Blog/bg-p/139/label-name/hyper-converged
Cheers!
Duncan Epping says
Wondering if vSOM will be included over time as well Calvin. The Infographic more or less eludes to it: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA5-6940ENW&cc=us&lc=en
Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) says
We’re definitely looking at how to drive increase customer value through integration or bundling with more software but vSOM isn’t integrated with EVO:RAIL today. The document you pointed to is referencing all our ConvergedSystem portfolio and other models in the family do support vSOM.
Duncan Epping says
Then a note may want to be added as the doc doesn’t really make that clear 🙂
Chris Purcell@hpconvergedsys says
Chris Purcell @HPConvergedSys
Chris Purcell @hpconvergedsys says
HP delivers a differentiated Hyper-Converged customer appliance experience
HP has COE support team dedicated to provide appliance level support for EVO:RAIL helping to improve fault isolation and repair time.
HP has tested and validated EVO:RAIL installation processes on HP ProLiant helping to reduce installation issues
HP has more certified VMware Certified Specialists than anyone else except VMware (source VMware)
HP has support engineers trained on EVO:RAIL installation processes helping to reduce installation issues
HP and VMware are working on the development of Integrations with HP One view to simplify management of the appliance
HP can help reduce life cycle management complexity by creating and validating software and firmware compatibility at an appliance level
HP has 14 year relationship with VMware integrating solutions
HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO:RAIL became orderable 2/9/2015. If you are interested here’s where to find more information Hyper-convergence: simplify your virtualization environment
http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Converged-Infrastructure/Hyper-convergence-simplify-your-virtualization-environment/ba-p/180000#.VNvUC_nF98E
DWP says
Thank you Nutanix…
aptones says
I wonder if there will be someone willing to do a comparison of all the EVO:RAIL products once they’re all GA…. =)
In my opinion, it’s probably going to be the feature set that each vendor bundles in with an EVO:RAIL that sells it.
Christopher Kusek (@cxi) says
For what it is worth.. That’s something I’ve been working on, a comparative breakdown of all of the various iterations.
aptones says
@Calvin & @Duncan
I’ve just seen all the HP Quickspecs for HP’s EVO:RAIL…. (http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetHtml.aspx?docname=c04499583) there’s no mention of OneView integration. Do you know if HP are still integrating this into their product?
duncan@yellow-bricks says
I was told it was being planned for, but haven’t heard anything since either. Not sure if/when it will happen
DWP says
Still not sure I follow this. As SDDC becomes more mature, why would we want HP to provide anything more than hardware?
If you look at the large data centers, they are quickly heading toward white boxes. This is because the software orchestrates the configuration and service deployment to the box. As all boxes they deploy are the same, there is little value in them and they are disposable.
So, with VMware’s end state being SDDC, why would we inject VSA, OneView, or other technologies? Would we not prefer a commodity “cookie cutter” comprised of VendorX hardware and VMware software?
Calvin Zito says
Seems to me the question is like asking why should we have anything besides vanilla ice cream – I don’t want chocolate chips in my vanilla or any other flavor. If “we” (not clear who “we” is, thus my quotes) don’t want to buy anything but EVO:RAIL and want a cookie cutter solution, that’s a customer choice. If HP wants to offer a differentiated solution, that’s HP’s choice.
I think HP offers the best of all options by offering customer choice: EVO:RAIL and 200-HC StoreVirtual System. So if you want vanilla, chocolate chips in your vanilla or another flavor, HP has that.
aptones says
interesting…. so HP offer the ‘vanilla’ EVO:RAIL flavour…. and the 200-HC flavour?
Is it just the StoreVirtual data services that gets added onto the latter, am I right in saying it looks like it’s HP VSA rather than virtual SAN?
I guess if someone just wants a vanilla EVO:RAIL they would just go buy a supermicro version! =)
Calvin Zito says
Not exactly. We’re adding chocolate chips to the vanilla. And that’s the beautiful thing – customer choice. HP is adding value and customers get to decide.
Also, one of the significant differences besides HP VSA is the pricing. 200-HC StoreVirtual last I heard was considerably less than EVO:RAIL.
Ken says
Speaking of pricing does anyone have any ballparks for the 200-hc? I am trying to avoid the normal sales call “fun” if I already know its out of range for my company.
Calvin Zito (@HPStorageGuy) says
There are 3 different models of the 200-HC:
>> EVO:RAIL
>> StoreVirtual all HDD (capacity optimized)
>> StoreVirtual mix of SSD and HDD (performance optimized)
I don’t have any of the pricing; drop me an email and I’ll see if I can find our list price. hpstorageguy at hp dot com.
Dimitar says
Can we rename the Virtual Center and join it to AD with custom name?