HPE OneView (formerly HP OneView)

Product history

The then-named Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. spent four years -- and worked with more than 150 of its customers in 30 data centers around the world -- to develop OneView as a management platform for its BladeSystem and ProLiant Generation 7 and 8 servers. When the product was released in 2013, it was intended to make management and deployment of converged infrastructure based on HP servers easier and faster than previous methods.

When Hewlett-Packard split into two companies in 2014, the PC and printer business lines became HP Inc., while the enterprise products and services business lines became Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). OneView, being an enterprise product, was renamed HPE OneView.

HPE OneView 4.0, released in January 2018, supports the ProLiant DL line of rack servers and the BL blade servers, from Generation 6 through 10 for monitoring, and Gen7 and Gen8 for both monitoring and virtualization.

Key features

HPE OneView features include the following:

• Server lifecycle management.
• Tight integration with HPE products, which facilitates and speeds deployment.
• RESTful API support and a message bus allow scripts to be written for task automation and integration with third-party tools and devices.
• Access to software development kits, Windows PowerShell and Python libraries.
• Virtualization support.
• The ability to take server profiles and to create templates from which future provisioning of storage, compute and networking can be modeled.
• Simple integration with other converged management tools, including products from VMware, Microsoft and Red Hat.
• Visibility into all data center resources and how they are connected through one screen.
• Interface features that are similar to those of popular commercial software.

HPE OneView comes with integrated components beyond the management console, including SmartSearch, MapView and Activity Feed.

SmartSearch allows IT administrators to search for information using a search engine that can autofill as the searcher types, much like a consumer search engine such as Google.

MapView shows an administrator a visual representation of the relationship between devices under OneView management, including connections and current status.

Activity Feed is a team collaboration tool that allows for messaging and task management and is where hardware alert messages are noted.

Pricing

The Standard version of HPE OneView is free to HPE clients, while the Advanced version is licensed for each physical server under the OneView management appliance.

Any HPE client with a Passport account can download the OneView management appliance software and either the Standard or Advanced version of HPE OneView.

The Standard version includes inventory, health monitoring, alerting and reporting functions for ProLiant DL and BL blade servers, from Generation 6 through 10, as well as HPE Apollo systems. It does not support virtualization and does not include updates or service, making it just a monitoring platform.

The fee-based HPE OneView Advanced version is licensed per physical server under the OneView management appliance and includes all of the features in the Standard version as well as virtualization functions, but only for Gen8 and Gen9 HPE servers. It also includes 24/7 support, updates and access to web-based training.