Hardware

Review: HPE Hyper Converged 380 Makes Deploying Virtual Machines a Breeze

This admin-friendly virtualization platform advances IT productivity and is ideal for SMB, remote and branch offices.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Equipping any workforce with virtual machines often makes more sense, physically and financially, than trying to deploy multiple desktops, workstations and servers to meet every possible business need.

The greatest obstacle with VMs, especially for small and medium-sized businesses, is an extended learning curve: Users now run, essentially, a software-defined data center.

The HPE Hyper Converged 380 system standardizes the approach to VM deployment. A key to the HPE 380’s power is backing from the new HPE ProLiant DL 380 Gen9 servers, which range from very high-end to modest setups, with plenty of open slots and configuration options.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: Processor Dual 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2697V3, Memory Up to 3TB HPE 2400MHz DDR4 SmartMemory, Read/Write Speed 12Gbps, Size 2U rack-mountable, Slots 24

The HPE 380 system comes in one of three main configurations: general virtualization, HPE CloudSystem and virtual desktop infrastructure. For our testing, we looked at one for general virtualization and another for VDI.

Simplifying the Process

Given the complexities of VM deployment, we braced for a steep learning curve and a lot of technical reading. Thankfully, HPE has eliminated many of the more cumbersome steps. Our ProLiant servers came with VMware vSphere and were loaded with the proper amount of storage and memory to support their planned role (the VDI unit had more flash memory to prevent boot storms, for example).

The HPE OneView User Experience interface makes VM deployment incredibly easy. We configured each based on its expected role, which varied wildly on the general virtualization server. Security programs and policies could be set to apply automatically to each new VM, or be added after the fact to all existing VMs or to specific ones, through the entire interface.

Performance monitoring, likewise, was very easy, and we could nicely show the need to expand the ProLiant DL 380 server to senior management as needed.

Never an easy task, deploying a network of VMs is typically fraught with dangers. But the HPE Hyper Converged 380 performs most of the hard work prior to deployment, and makes continuing maintenance a breeze. For SMBs looking to finally take advantage of virtualization, the 380 is a good way to open that tricky door.

Tackle Virtual Desktops

Trying to deploy a virtual desktop infrastructure is one of the most challenging tasks that any IT staff can attempt. Not only does VDI touch most, if not all, of an organization’s human users, it’s also prone to wild performance swings. Maybe nothing of note happens late at night, while huge “boot storms” are common in the morning when everybody turns on their system to begin work. When users can’t do their jobs, a business can’t operate.

The VDI server in our test bed was packed with high-performance HPE 2400MHz DDR4 SmartMemory and, compared with the other configurations, had more empty expansion slots filled with storage drives to support more users.

Getting new desktops configured and online was incredibly easy using the OneView interface. In fact, once we configured one corporate desktop exactly the way we wanted it, we simply deployed that configuration to multiple users. The whole process was much easier than we have previously experienced with other VDI deployments. Once deployed, we triggered each of our VMs to boot up at the same time, then watched through the UX interface as the boot storm blew in. Surprisingly, it turned out to be more of a trickle than a storm for our VDI server. The high level of input/output operations per second (IOPS), which would normally kill VDI, was handled easily by the properly configured HPE ProLiant DL 380 server. At about half of the recommended number of virtual desktops, the system was not taxed beyond 35 percent during the mass booting.

Another nice advantage was that we could manage both the VDI and the general virtualization server we worked with at the same time through the UX interface. Security and general policies could be deployed across both networks from the same interface, allowing SMBs to expand their virtualization network in any direction as needed without placing much extra burden on IT staff.

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise