It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since HPE introduced VM Essentials, its new virtualization platform. From announcement at HPE Discover 2024, major milestone features have been released on a rapid cadence of new capabilities, integrations, and market innovation which have propelled VME from a virtualization platform hopeful, to a capable and credible threat in the hypervisor industry.
TL;DR – If you have been living under a rock and have not heard about HPE VM Essentials, or if you reviewed it on an early release, and were hoping for more features; it’s time to check out VME now.
What is HPE VM Essentials?
For those of you who are new to VME, it was brought into the HPE fold as part of the Morpheus Software acquisition. HPE has been leveraging Morpheus for a number of years both in its managed services business as well as embedding it within GreenLake Private Cloud services. In fact, if you have clicked your way to a new Kubernetes configuration or deployed a VM from your GreenLake virtualization vending machine in Private Cloud Enterprise, it was deployed behind the scenes with Morpheus. Morpheus Enterprise enables customers to drive a true private cloud experience with enriched deployment features. Supporting multi-tenanted FinOps, SecOps, and DevOps controls for multi-cloud adoption, Morpheus Enterprise is a popular choice amongst the enterprise as well as many service providers to deliver improved multi-cloud provisioning and lifecycle management. Effectively giving organization’s the capability to wrangle shadow IT in the public cloud, and simplify on-prem deployments alike. Morpheus Enterprise integrates with virtually every hypervisor and hyperscaler as well as includes its own container deployment, and of course VM Essentials, a KVM based hypervisor providing a new enterprise ready virtualization option to organizations looking for an alternative to their VMware licensing woes.
HPE VM Essentials is available both through the licensing of Morpheus Enterprise, or on its own for customers who don’t need the automation features of the full-blown Enterprise suite. In my opinion, VME is gaining traction for three primary reasons:
- Multiple deployment options
- A certified 3rd Party Hardware Compatibility List
- No nonsense, cost effective per-socket pricing
To understand how VME is succeeding, we need to review what’s been happening in the hypervisor market for the past few years. To be honest, there are several hypervisors that have made admirable strides to provide customers with options for datacenter virtualization. However none, with a decade’s worth of racetrack, have been able to make a dent in VMware’s base. Only single digit market share has been awarded to the largest of this group. There have also been some false starts and wavering dedication to multiple major vendors platform’s that has shaken consumer confidence.
A primary challenge to the current competing hypervisor products is the lack of a single platform that supports all of the traditional deployment modes; HCI, Disaggregated HCI, and traditional 3-tier stack. Many vendors focused on the HCI approach which offers excellent economics at the edge, however, struggles to cost effectively scale to even average mid-market customer’s requirements. Opposingly, HCI platforms typically also require large deployments for any level of redundancy that a customer with savvy foresight would demand, inflating deployments well beyond what many customers needed to support their virtualization environment. A great example of this was ESG’s study of HPE’s Private Cloud Business Edition effortlessly demonstrating a 2.5x cost benefit vs traditional HCI (a quick google will connect you with the whitepaper). Further to this challenge, many customers complain of the costs of these HCI solutions being so close to that of their existing VMware solution that it presented no real option for consideration. Quite simply put, no one wants to risk changing from their existing experience with a market leader unless there is measurable cost benefit. Other vendors have taken the traditional 3-tier stack virtualization route but are most notably missing a certified hardware compatibility list, often with lackluster support.
Enter VME…
VME is supported in a software defined HCI configuration with HPE SimpliVity, in a disaggregated HCI experience on HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, and in a traditional 3-tier stack deployment on HPE as well 3rd party vendor hardware. Having the ability to leverage a single hypervisor across multiple deployment scenarios means customers don’t need to trade-off between selecting the best architecture for mixed environments or the complexity of managing multiple hypervisors to achieve their desired goals.
The introduction of support for 3rd party hardware vendors within VME was counter intuitive to some. “Why wouldn’t HPE support only their own hardware, it would drive adoption”. The simple fact is that most customers have a mixture of vendors in their datacenter, or at the very least have the need for the ability to test VME on their existing systems. Supporting 3rd party hardware isn’t enough though. Customers need a Hardware Compatibility List that support truly stands behind. No one wants to go back in time 20 years to lost weekends troubleshooting why a VM won’t migrate to a host based on a NIC driver issue. Best effort support isn’t going to cut it to change a customer’s religion on virtualization platforms. This, coupled with HPE being a tier 1 manufacturer solves the other nagging hypervisor industry problems. Specifically, 24×7 support where someone actually answers the phone, software vendors like the major backup applications launching support for VME, and the ability to sell to large public sector organizations and enterprises to create a community. The new startups can’t do this.
What’s changed since VM Essentials was initially introduced?
Since launch monthly updates have been released. Which if nothing else, have made it a requirement to stay-tuned to keep to up to date with anticipated features. As VME approaches a feature set that addresses almost every customer’s core needs, a welcome change will be the move to quarterly releases which will be easier to stay on top of, from both an update perspective, as well as messaging these exciting enhancements to customers. Here is my top list of updates that have occurred in VME’s inaugural year:
ISV Support
The introduction of ISV software support has been steadily progressing across data protection as well as certified applications. Most notably, backup vendor support from Commvault, and now Veeam, currently in beta for change-block tracking backup. Cohesity customers will be excited to know that its integration is also currently underway. With HPE Zerto now also in beta, customers will have an excellent data protection and ransomware mitigation strategy to compliment these options.
Hardware Compatibility List
If you have not checked the compatibility list recently, support has been added for several HPE ProLiant servers stretching back to Gen 9 options, as well as HPE Synergy Blades and HPE Alletra 4000. There is also an impressive and growing list of HPE and 3rd party storage arrays certified, as well as the introduction of 3rd party server support.
Hardware plug-ins
To support improved integration with the HPE ecosystem, new plug-ins have been added for HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 and the HPE Networking CX10000 series of switches. These enhancements support exciting features like direct LUN and data protection integration from VME Manager as well as micro-segmentation and networking capabilities to further support enterprise data center configuration directly from the virtual administrator’s domain.
Simplified installer
A simplified installer released earlier this year brought together the packages and distributions into a single unified experience. This streamlined the deployment process for new HVM nodes substantially reducing headaches, a welcome update for early adopters.
Virtual Machine migration
For customers who joined the beta and early versions of VME, the migration process was an external service that required some manual interaction and only supported single VM migrations. At HPE Discover 2025, they introduced the new embedded VME Manager migration functionality that allows customers to point to their VMware vCenter and select up to 20 systems at a time for automated parallel migration. For smaller or phased deployments this is likely all customers will need to effectively get started with VME. However, for larger and more complex situations, HPE has also partnered with software vendors to deliver impressive migration capabilities from across multiple hypervisors and hyperscalers. Assistance for customers in these complex migration scenarios is currently available through HPE Services and a rapidly growing list of partners.
Entropic Ransomware Detection
One of the most top of mind concerns for customers today is the ever-present threat of ransomware. With the fifth major release of its OS (R5), the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 array introduced a Shannon-based entropic variable block encryption detection algorithm. This capability sets the B10000 apart from the rest of the industry for its ability to leverage a new ransomware detection vector without the requirement for cyber-security vaccine updates to catch zero-day threat patterns. And importantly, because it’s deployed at the block layer, it can support any application whose data is stored within the array. Much has been written about this revolutionary capability already so I won’t focus here, but what is new is the ability to pass the compromised block manifest directly to VME so that the individual impacted VMs can be identified within VME Manager. Imagine the ability to instantly have visibility to the blast radius and time of event within a ransomware attack, and the tools to act and quarantine an individual VM before the attacker can remove access to information. This is a remarkable addition to HPE’s cybersecurity mitigation capabilities as it allows a VM admin to roll back a single VM (not an entire datastore with potentially a 100 VMs) to a pre-incident moment in time.
Final thoughts
As you can see it has been a fast-paced year for VME. From beta to an enterprise ready platform steadily growing in support and customer adoption. With the year ahead promising to introduce an equally impressive set of advancements like metro clustering, software defined networking, and further integration into HPE’s GreenLake Platform AIOps and management journey, the future is a bold option for customers eagerly looking for an alternative to data center virtualization. If you were an early reviewer of HPE VME and were waiting for the addition of some critical features, or to see how the market would react to a new platform, you need to look again.
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