HPE announces an expansion of its private cloud portfolio with the addition of HPE Morpheus VM Essential and Morpheus Enterprise Software. This software simplifies the management of virtual machines and offers a unified cloud management solution. HPE combines the software with its private cloud solutions to offer customers greater flexibility, lower costs, and better performance. The software is also available as a standalone version.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise today took a significant step in acquiring VMware’s market share. The HPE private cloud portfolio now includes integration with HPE Morpheus Software. This addition follows the acquisition of Morpheus Data in August last year and is a logical continuation of HPE’s strategy to help organizations modernize their hybrid IT environments.
Cost savings and flexibility with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials
Introducing HPE Morpheus VM Essentials within HPE Private Cloud Business Edition is a major step forward. This software reduces license costs for virtual machines by up to 90 percent. Thanks to multi-hypervisor support and a self-service cloud environment, organizations can easily migrate their VMs. The cost savings are based on what organizations currently pay for their existing VM infrastructure from other providers, where HPE primarily targets VMware customers.
HPE’s decision to develop its own virtualization solution was quite surprising. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many organizations are looking for alternatives due to new terms and conditions and increased prices. It was not expected that HPE would jump on this, but the company made a strategic choice that seems to be paying off big time.
Fidelma Russo, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Hybrid Cloud and CTO at HPE, explains: “Enterprises are at a pivotal moment in IT modernization where they must address escalating management complexity and increasing virtualization costs to free investments for core growth areas. We are the leader in disaggregated infrastructure and our private cloud combines that leadership with new software for unified virtualization and cloud management.”
HPE Morpheus Software family is now generally available
The complete HPE Morpheus Software family is now generally available and consists of two main components:
- HPE Morpheus VM Essentials: focused on virtual workloads (VMs) and with a per-socket licensing model to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
- HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software: provides unified cloud management and enables the management of virtual machines, containers, and third-party runtimes on bare metal, on-premises, and in the public cloud.
An essential aspect of HPE Morpheus Enterprise is that it is hardware-agnostic and can run as standalone software. It has been validated for use on Dell PowerEdge servers, NetApp AFF arrays, and HPE’s own ProLiant servers. This universal compatibility is a strategic move by HPE since many organizations have server hardware from multiple vendors.
Integration with HPE hardware for optimal performance
HPE has also fully integrated Morpheus Software with its own hardware solutions. According to HPE, combining VM Essentials with HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 delivers a TCO reduction of up to 48 percent, a performance gain of up to 10x, and improved security through microsegmentation and DPU acceleration.
In addition, HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 is integrated, enabling simple and granular storage management within the Morpheus solution. This means that HPE supports virtually all server hardware owned by organizations while also offering fully integrated solutions that go beyond virtualization alone.
Enterprise-grade solution to help modernize virtualization
To help customers transition to this new solution, HPE is introducing a new cloud platform service called virtualization modernization. This solution provides an assessment and an end-to-end process for creating landing zones to easily migrate VMs. It also provides support for workload replatforming and data migrations. This is particularly interesting for very large organizations with complex virtualization environments.
In recent years, HPE has focused heavily on developing private cloud solutions for various workloads, including, more recently, specific AI workloads. The addition of Morpheus Software fits into this broader portfolio and, with the enterprise edition, offers customers the ability to manage their entire hybrid cloud within the HPE environment.
Availability
HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials is available now. New Business Edition systems with HPE SimpliVity will be available in the third quarter of 2025. The HPE Morpheus Software integration for HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 is available immediately, and the integration with the HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 will follow in June. HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software is already available as standalone software.
With these enhancements, HPE strengthens its position in the private cloud solutions market and offers a serious alternative for organizations looking to rethink their virtualization strategy following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware.