Recently, I was lucky enough to attend one of the first training classes for HP OneView version 1.2, which was hosted by Avnet in Scottsdale, AZ. While I had seen some presales demos and introductions to the solution, I had not been able to actually work with it. OneView installs easily as a virtual machine with almost everything it needs built-in. If you plan to use OneView to deploy the hypervisor or bare-metal operating systems, you’ll also need to install the HP Insight Control server provisioning virtual appliance.
Once the OneView image is deployed, powering up leads you through a wizard that includes an option to enable remote HP support assistance and network settings. After the network values are applied, you can login using your browser of choice since the interface is all HTML5.
After login, you start creating your pieces of server and enclosure profiles. Networking settings define your Layer 2 Ethernet and FCoE fabrics, which are then grouped together as a network set. The Logical Interconnect Groups define the uplink connectivity from the HP c7000 chassis and are then applied to an enclosure group. The enclosure groups are used to apply settings to chassis that have the same configuration for LAN and SAN connectivity. From there, if you have connections to 3PAR storage systems either using FlatSAN or Brocade fabrics, you can define storage pools and volumes that can be created automatically when a server profile is assigned to a slot. A server profile is used to define network connections, BIOS/UEFI settings, firmware baselines, storage volumes and virtual addressing. Server profiles can be used as templates, but updating a template won’t update existing server profiles that have been created from it.
When the server profile is copied and assigned to a server bay, the server will have any hardware firmware applied if necessary and, if Insight Control server provisioning is setup, an OS or hypervisor is installed using IP addresses from a pool. If you are deploying to VMware and managing this through the vCenter plug-in, the host is added to the cluster and left in maintenance mode with networking and storage definitions in place.
After your chassis and servers are imported or deployed, you monitor health using the OneView dashboard, which shows generalized health information on the front page and can be clicked on to drill down and see power, CPU, temperature, etc. Notifications can be sent to emails when levels are hit or errors are detected, plus REST APIs allow for integration into your other tools if you have that requirement.
Overall, OneView is good for HP environments and should be implemented when you can. And there are attractive licensing options that allow for upgrades from Insight Control if you’re interested. Please contact your Sirius account executive, or contact us to learn more.
