HPOV General Question

[vikazazoulina]

Hello everyone,
I have general question about HP OpenView software and I woudl really appreciate feedback of people who work with this tool. Currently we trying to narrow down Infrastructure Managment software for our over 300 remote locations and 5 regional offices. Some of our IT department members have very limited experience with this tool so our inhouse knowledge is limited in this respect. Primary purpose of this tool for us will be: management of software, hardware,inventory, patches, updates, data exchange, help desk, network devices monitoring, remote access, users training. Those are the most important tasks that will be required after initial deployment. Our remote systems runing Linux, SCO Unix, Windows. All our remote locations will have DSL(99%) and Frame Relay(1%).
Can anybody share your expirience with this tool, level of satisfaction and maiby major reasons why you went with this software but not Tivoli or any other less expencive tools?
Another question if you have similar environment how many full time people you have to maintain this environment and how long it took you to develop inhouse expertise and bring your production environment to the satisfactory level?

Thanks,
Apreciate your help

Viktoria Zazoulina

 

[Rovent]

Vika -

Actually, you might be looking for a combination of tools. HPOV is great for network monitoring, but really doesn't do a whole lot else besides that.

Microsoft SMS actually does a lot of what you're looking for, and if you get SMS 2003 it does it fairly well. SMS tracks hardware and software inventories, pushes patches and updates to the user base, allows for remote control, along with having it's own built in reports engine, software license managment. The only problem, is that SMS doesn't support (at the moment) anything besides Windows.

Both have a very high learning curve, and neither have any really great literature out there on them. Combined though, they can do some pretty amazing things. I've managed to set up HPOV to use SMS's remote control tool, and i've got an automated script that searches the SMS database for a list of 450 spyware programs, and generates a report shows which users have any installed. . .

As for why we use these other than Tivoli, this is all we were allowed. We used to use BigBrother (

http://www.bb4.com)

and MRTG (

http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/)

very effectivly, but our supervisors didn't understand Unix, so we had to replace those with HPOV. If cost is a concern, go with BB and MRTG.

Our environment is about 3000 users, 1000 workstations, 99% Windows 2000.

hope this helps

- Alex

 

[vikazazoulina]

Hi Alex,
Thanks very much for your info on both products. For some reasons our management is kind of sceptical about SMS (of course that scepticism is unfounded, none of them have any exposure to SMS, they just use rumors) and I should add that OS Systems ratio in our environment is as following:
10 % Linux - slow growth in installations
75 % SCO Unix - steady decline (will probably get rid of it in three years)
15 % Windows - fastest growing area (will try to move all our workstations to Windows)
Our Servers will be on Sun Solaris, Linux and some on Windows.
So, as you can see it is important for us to take care of all those environments but again if it will make sense to mix those infrastructure management tools we will certainly consider that.

Again, thanks for your info

Viktoria Zazoulina