This week HPE announced its 3rd offering in its Hyperconverged portfolio.
After the HC250 for VMware vSphere and the HC250 for Microsoft Cloud Platform System (both based on Apollo’s 2U chassis with up to 4 server blades) now there is a DL380 based solution called the HC380.
2 remarks returned quite often when offering the CS250 solution:
- Storage options are limited: there are SAS only, SSD tiering and even all-flash offerings, but 6 drives per server blade gave you a lot of CPU and memory with a limited amount of capacity in some situations.
- For true VDI workloads, there is no option to add professional graphic cards.
These 2 ‘complaints’ are now solved with the HC380.
By choosing another hardware platform (the well-known DL380 Gen9 series, worlds most sold server) gives HPE now the flexibility to offer 24 drives per node instead of 6, and adds extended graphics support with up to 2 Nvidia GRID cards per node.
This gives you a variety of configuration choice points:
Scalability stays similar, starting with 2 HC380 nodes growing up to 16 nodes in a cluster:
As mentioned the storage options are extended now giving you the flexibility to add up to 24 disks per node. This is always done in blocks of 8 disks, and must be homogenous throughout the cluster.
Various options are there like SAS only and hybrid with SSD tiering:
Software update: VM vending machine
However this is not a hardware only change. Also on software side there is a major change happening trying to make the life of the administrator even easier.
OK with the CS250 we could deploy the system in 15 minutes and with the OV4VC plug-in we could do all admin stuff in our well known vCenter client.
But now with the new HC380 Management UI HPE shows that it can be done even easier as before. I see options for my daughter starting to help me from now in in my company. 😉
This new software stack will deliver a solution lifecycle management for the hardware (firmware, driver and software updates), monitoring but also the hypervisors running on the solution. The UI allows in 5 clicks the complete deployment of a VM.
My good friend Calvin Zito was one of the first to try this new UI and made a cool video post on it. Check it out here:
His full article on the HC380 can be found on his storage blog www.hpe.com/storage/blog
Other software enhancements are the possibility to integrate with CloudSystem 9.0. By adding this stack this solution will create a Cloud-in-a-box experience… Cloud-ready in less than 2 hours…
As soon as HPE permits I will try to get a hands-on on this new HC380 and will write in detail about the unboxing and installation experience.
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