Today, VMware is pleased to announce a new collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to deliver a superior hyperconverged infrastructure customer experience with the Integrated HPE vSAN ReadyNodes. IT organizations are more integral to business success than ever before, and their projects assist development of new products and services to drive top line growth. In order to meet the needs of the business, IT leaders need to simplify their infrastructure and accelerate IT operations. To implement the change needed to move faster, IT has increasingly turned to software-based hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Recently, VMware partnered with HPE to provide customers a more integrated experience, including ease of procurement, lifecycle management simplicity, and single source of support for vSAN powered HCI.
“We’re excited to partner with VMware on this initiative to accelerate hyperconverged systems based on HPE ProLiant,” said Shin-Wen Kuo at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
“Customers want to focus their resources on innovation, not routine tasks, so we’re proud of the integration we’ve done with VMware to deliver simplified lifecycle management and single source support.”
Ease of HCI Procurement
The new customer experience starts with procurement. Integrated HPE vSAN ReadyNode on ProLiant now come with all necessary software factory pre-installed:
- VMware vSphere, the market-leading hypervisor
- VMware vSAN, the market-leading storage virtualization software
- VMware vCenter for unified management
- VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) compliant firmware
Simplified Lifecycle Management
Day 1 operations have been simplified with the creation of an easy, automated and guided bring-up of the HCI system and clusters. The new workflow assures that all the correct customer-unique information is gathered. The workflow can be used for new or existing vCenter deployments.
With the introduction of vSphere and vSAN 7, customers can use the new vSphere lifecycle management tool, vSphere Lifecycle Manager, for HCI cluster updates. Lifecycle management is a time-consuming task. Admins maintain their infrastructure with a plethora of tools that require specialized skills. VMware customers currently use two different interfaces for day two operations: vSphere Update Manager (VUM) for software and drivers and server vendor-provided tools for firmware updates. VMware HCI completely redefines lifecycle management through a unified software and firmware management that is native to vSphere called vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM).
vLCM is built off a declarative or desired-state model that provides lifecycle management for the hypervisor and the full stack of drivers and firmware for the servers powering your data center. vLCM can be used to apply an image, monitor the compliance, and remediate the cluster if there is drift. In addition, vLCM validates that components of the firmware update are on the VMware HCL prior to updating the cluster. vLCM is a powerful new approach to creating simplified consistent server lifecycle management at scale.
Finally, customers can monitor the status of their HPE ProLiant servers from vCenter. Hardware health status and holistic system information will be available within vCenter as the single point of management. In addition, certain day 2 tasks can be accomplished within vCenter: customers can add or expand HPE ProLiant nodes in the cluster with just a few clicks.
Single Source of Support
For many customers, a single source of support is highly desirable, as it can lead to faster time to resolution for support requests in certain situations. For Integrated HPE vSAN ReadyNode with VMware vSAN, customers now receive HPE-based support for all Level 1 and Level 2 requests, with a handoff to VMware support for Level 3 software support requests.
Next Steps
- Want a general overview of vSAN? Read the data sheet.
- Want to see which Integrated HPE vSAN ReadyNode is right for you? Read the datasheet
- Take a technical deep dive at StorageHub
