The rapid changes Broadcom instituted after buying virtualization stalwart VMware for $61 billion in late 2023 continue to shape the virtualization and cloud spaces, with some enterprises facing significant higher pricing, new licensing plans, and bunding options looking for alternatives, vendors offering them alternatives, and companies rolling out plans to help with the migrations.
As we noted before, Red Hat earlier this year launched OpenShift Virtualization Engine, another version of OpenShift that basically gives VMware users a virtualization-only option by removing container features. This move came in large part after conversations Red Hat executives had with VMware customers in the wake of the price hikes and other changes Broadcom made to VMware’s business model.
For its part, Hewlett Packard Enterprise late last year introduced HPE VM Essentials, a package of virtualization capabilities that included the new HPE VME hypervisor and virtual machine management features that provides another alternative to VMware and marked the IT giant’s place in a global virtualization market that could surpass $100 billion in revenues this year.
HPE this week is expanding its VM and cloud efforts, combining VM Essentials with the cloud and IT management software acquired via its acquisition of Morpheus Data last year in its HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, which the company said will reduce the cost of VM licenses 10-fold. Private Cloud Business Edition can run as a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or distributed HCI (dHCI) to stretch its capabilities from the datacenter to the edge.
At the same time, HPE is announced the general availability of its Morpheus Software family, which includes what is now Morpheus VM Essentials for virtualized workloads and Morpheus Enterprise Software for a unified cloud management offering. Both include HPE’s hypervisor.
Both were included as part of a larger package of announcements that targeted the private cloud for enterprises and data availability and resilience for smaller businesses via expanded features in the vendors StoreOnce storage portfolio.
A VMware Alternative
While never mentioning Broadcom or VMware by name, HPE executives who prebriefed journalists and analysts about the new offerings were clear that expanded capabilities through the combining of VM Essentials and Morpheus Software gives disgruntled VMware users another option to consider. A key point was that HPE’s offering delivers a 90 percent reduction in licensing costs, according to HPE.
“In 2024, virtualization costs literally soared double – even triple – digits,” said Cheri Williams, senior vice president and general manager for the private cloud at HPE. “In December 2024, we introduced HPE VM Essentials, which gives our customers a real choice in virtualization and a really affordable path forward. Now we’re bringing together HPE VM Essentials and HPE Morpheus software and extending it across our entire private cloud.”
Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president and chief product officer for Private Cloud and Flex solutions at HPE, said that “there’s a transformation in the industry and with HPE VM Essentials hypervisor, we’re lowering the licensing costs by 90 percent. Very simple math: Take a single server with one socket with 48 cores. Today, if you price it on a per-core basis on one side, and you look at our pricing – which is on a per-socket basis – you see a 90 percent savings on licensing costs just on a server.”
Given the changes made to VMware offerings by Broadcom, licensing and other costs are a key consideration. Broadcom did away with standalone product purchases in favor of bundled packages that may include products that organizations don’t need and which could drive costs up by 10x or more. VMware executives argue that such streamlining of the product portfolio makes it easier for organizations to deal with the vendor. The company also shifted from perpetual to subscription licenses, which also could add costs.
Morpheus Continues To Expand
HPE also is growing the ecosystem around Morpheus VM Essentials, according to Bhardwaj. It supports the full HPE stack and also includes databases from the likes of Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MongoDB, guest operating systems from Microsoft, Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, and CentOS. In addition, Commvault is used for backup via native integration and HPE will also add Dell’s PowerEdge servers and NetApp’s AFF storage and data infrastructure.
HPE also is leaning on its new Morpheus Enterprise Software suite to give enterprises a single cloud management interface for VM, container-base, and third-party runtimes that spans on-premises environments, public clouds, and bare-metal infrastructure. A key point is the automation of application delivery, which the company said accelerates application deployment into hypervisors or clouds by 150 times and lowers cloud costs by more than 30 percent.
Bhardwaj also stressed the benefits of combining VM Essentials with Aruba’s CX 1000 network switches, focusing on the network microsegementation capabilities that provides improved security for traffic running between VMs.
“The traditional approach of doing that is on the hypervisor,” he said. “That causes cycles on the hypervisor, and, frankly, the way that is being delivered today, customers have to pay extra costs on the server. The way we are changing that is we are bringing the microsegmentation capability. We are leveraging that capability on the HPE Aruba network switch so that the microsegmentation can be enabled on the switch and orchestrated by our HPE Morpheus Enterprise Manager. What it does is deliver microsegmentation capabilities inside the switch vs. the hypervisor. The benefits are better performance, lower costs, and it also extends many other capabilities.”
Those other capabilities include IPSec VPNs, network address translation, more security functions.