Why Companies Are Considering VME for Their Virtualization Environments

Every week, I talk to customers looking to change up their virtualization environments due to increasing costs and increasingly complex licensing requirements from their current vendor. They’re intrigued by HPE Morpheus VM Essentials (VME), but they often don’t know a great deal about the offering.

HPE acquired Morpheus Data last August and began offering VME as a stand-alone virtualization software solution in December. Originally developed by Morpheus and now supported by HPE, VME provides organizations with easy, cost-effective virtualization via an enterprise-grade hypervisor built on kernel-based virtual machine technology.

As they learn more about VME, leaders are especially intrigued by these key benefits:

Many organizations are reconsidering their virtualization environments for the first time in decades, after changes in the virtualization marketplace have led their bills to skyrocket. VME not only costs less than most competitors but also offers an attractive socket-based pricing model. Often, licensing costs are based on cores, which forces companies to pay more to support better performance. By contrast, HPE charges $600 per year, per processor — whether those processors have eight, 32 or even 160 cores.

In addition to grappling with rising overall costs, many organizations are frustrated that their current virtualization vendor is forcing them into bundled licensing packages. These sorts of licensing models often require customers to pay for features they don’t want and won’t use. For example, a company might be forced into paying for additional automation, monitoring, disaster recovery or cloud capabilities, simply to continue supporting its existing virtualization environment. With VME, the model is simple: Customers want virtualization, they pay for virtualization, and they get virtualization.

VME includes a built-in management layer. The platform can also help organizations manage their existing VMware environments, giving IT administrators a unified management hub even if they continue to run VMware resources in parallel to VME. The VME user interface is powered by Morpheus Enterprise, an orchestration and management platform. This provides an easy upgrade path to Morpheus Enterprise, which enables streamlined management across multiple environments, including Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

HPE offers 24/7 call-in support for VME, giving customers around-the-clock access to a knowledgeable support team. As HPE continues to add vendors to its compatibility matrix, customers should have confidence that their servers, storage systems and networking hardware will integrate seamlessly with VME.

While customers may be motivated to explore alternatives, it can be scary to switch virtualization vendors. Today, virtualization provides the foundation for most business-critical systems at many companies, so leaders likely won’t have confidence in an upstart hypervisor platform. Because VME is developed and supported by a trusted, industry-recognized partner like HPE, customers can rest easy knowing the platform is robust and reliable. This isn’t a boutique offering; it’s a major global technology company making a big virtualization play at just the moment customers need a new option from a provider they can trust.