Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s hypervisor platform is now available with hybrid cloud management tools.
The vendor now bundles the software and technology from Morpheus Data, to provide an enterprise-ready hypervisor intended to compete with Broadcom’s VMware, the Nutanix virtualization platform and open source platforms like Proxmox. HPE acquired Morpheus Data last August.
Third-party integrations, including with HPE’s hardware competitors like Dell Technologies and NetApp, are a focus for the new offering, according to HPE. The software is available as part of HPE’s GreenLake private cloud catalog or standalone.
The fortunes of IT hardware titans have been tied to infrastructure software in the past, primarily VMware in the enterprise, said Naveen Chhabra, an analyst at Forrester Research. HPE is the first vendor to push into virtualization software of its own making following the market shakeup in the wake of Broadcom’s VMware acquisition in 2023.
“If you want to maintain your hardware business, you need to build your software business,” Chhabra said. “HPE is the first hardware vendor to take this on.”
Product launch
If you want to maintain your hardware business, you need to build your software business. Naveen ChhabraAnalyst, Forrester Research
HPE VM Essentials, released in December last year, is now called HPE Morpheus VM Essentials.
This basic hypervisor offering now has an enterprise upgrade path with HPE Morpheus Enterprise, a hybrid cloud management platform that includes the HPE hypervisor alongside the Morpheus workload management software for VMs, containers and other infrastructure, according to HPE spokespeople during a press briefing.
Today’s hypervisor releases also include two new private cloud versions with HPE Private Cloud Business Edition on HPE SimpliVity, an HCI offering intended for edge deployments and Business Edition on Alletra Storage MP, a scaled-out disaggregated HVI variant for scaling in the data centers, according to the vendor.
The software is sold using one-, three- or five-year contracts and priced per server CPU socket, according to HPE.
The addition of Morpheus software aims to create an enterprise-class hypervisor that can interoperate with a variety of public clouds, third-party hardware and HPE’s GreenLake offerings, said Rajeev Bhardwaj, vice president and chief product officer of Private Cloud and Flex Solutions at HPE.
Third-party interoperability in both software and hardware is a focus for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, which can work alongside existing hypervisor environments such as VMware and in public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure, he said.
At launch, the software can integrate with Commvault’s backup platform alongside third-party databases and operating systems such as Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE, MongoDB and more. Hardware support at launch includes HPE’s ProLiant servers and Alletra Storage.
Planned future updates to supported hardware will include Dell PowerEdge servers and NetApp AFF storage hardware, Bhardwaj said, as HPE wants to keep the hypervisor’s ecosystem flexible and open. “When it comes to cloud, there is no one-size-fits-all,” he said.
Other HPE products launched Wednesday include new HPE StoreOnce backup appliances, the 3720 and 3760, for SMBs and branch locations. The company’s storage lineup will also have new service-level agreements for availability, resilience and energy consumption. These new StoreOnce appliances are available with 18 TB to 216 TB of local usable storage.
Market future
HPE’s choice to work more closely with business rivals like Dell and NetApp shows the cloud model of infrastructure and service consumption has changed the relationships among companies historically known for selling discrete hardware, said Scott Sinclair, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of Omdia.
The GreenLake platform moved HPE closer to a private cloud vendor more than its rivals, but customer habits and IT expectations — especially when dealing with reduced budgets — will force vendors to ensure their capabilities and ecosystems can operate with competitors.
“Vendors 10 to 15 years ago lived in a world of single ecosystems run by themselves,” Sinclair said. “Given the scale of these environments and how distributed and complex they are, vendors realized they can’t deliver a closed environment anymore. Many customers are dealing with a heterogeneous ecosystem.”
The HPE Morpheus VM Essentials launch is an example of this interoperability, as customers are looking for VMware alternatives but see ways to avoid vendor lock-in as valuable market differentiation, he said. Broadcom’s acquisition and subsequent licensing changes after decades of tightly integrating the VMware platform into critical workloads have made customers gun-shy about adopting platforms lacking portability or migration capabilities.
Although HPE bundling of Morpheus’ workload management software does differentiate its hypervisor, the overall virtualization market is already rich in alternatives and numerous mature open source platforms, said Marc Staimer, founder and president of Dragon Slayer Consulting.
“These open source services are pretty mature,” Staimer said. “It’s not a science project anymore.”
Customers should have been evaluating hypervisor alternatives previously, Sinclair said.
“Even before the Broadcom acquisition, there was value to evaluating alternative hypervisors,” Sinclair said. “But there was relative standardization [with VMware]. Fast forward to now, and there has been an extensive desire for alternative hypervisors. There’s a little bit of a gold rush going on here.”
Although the virtue of openness may be sought by IT buyers, many customers stick with as few vendors as possible to avoid challenges like visibility and compatibility, Chhabra said. HPE’s virtualization offering could differentiate the vendor over open source competition, as it would offer a more complete stack and enterprise-grade support.
“The more vendor technologies [involved], the more opportunities for failure,” he said.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
