Eliminating Hypervisor Lock In and Accelerating Private Cloud with HPE

My name is Barat Ramm. I lead the product management team, uh, for at HV for private Cloud, uh, specifically a product called Private Cloud Business Edition, uh, which is kind of a three tier architecture that, and then we do a lot of day zero, day one, um, automation around it. Um, I also lead another product called HVH HP VM Essentials.

Uh, Brad touched on it. Um, we'll be going to a deeper dive on, on those products as well. Uh, with me, I also have Daniel Elder.

So Daniel, do you wanna introduce yourself? Absolutely. Uh, thanks, broth.

Uh, hello everyone. It's, uh, great to be here. I'm a, a product manager on Broths team, and, uh, work extensively on private cloud Business edition, uh, as well as VM Essentials.

So, thank you. All right. So let's get in the meat, meat of the, uh, the conversation here.

So, so weird. You know, we are in 2025, the, uh, age of the ai, but we're still talking about virtualization, but that's the need of the, the market right now, right? Um, so as we know with the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, the industry has gone a big change.

Um, you know, we see customers cost skyrocketing, um, anywhere. What we've seen is anywhere between two to five x and in fact, some customers at 15 x, right, based on their deployment types and so forth, uh, which has led to some interesting choice points. I mean, customers are looking to, um, kind of go into other types of, uh, runtime environments.

It could be bare metal, it could be virtualization, it could be containers, uh, but also, you know, it, it with VMware itself, uh, it's kind of a, a lock-in that has come up, right? You know, what do we do? Our workloads are so ingrained into the virtualization stack.

How do we migrate to a different, uh, platform? Um, and then, you know, it leads to on certain strategy right now, right? Like, what is, what is our future going forward with Broadcom, uh, with things constantly changing, um, as we progress?

What I dig up recently was this interesting fact, um, you know, back in 2024, which is last year, um, there were only 65% of customers looking or evaluating their options. Right? Now, that has kind of jumped to 75%.

Um, and a lot of the customers who are taking a wait see approach, have now more actively looking at an alternative. Well, that's because they're either at the, the end of their term, uh, subscription, uh, renewal term, or they have to kind of come up with a strategy because they only have a year or two left in their software stack, uh, term itself. Um, I mean, majority of the reason, of course, is cost, which is driving it.

Um, but of course, the other things around, uh, scalability, performance, and how to kind of get their workloads to a different environment, right? So I found this a stat to be, uh, pretty interesting, uh, which is what we're seeing in the market today. Excuse me.

Yes. But go back to that slide. The 75% are saying, and I'm, I don't mean to be a nitpicker here, but that number, you're, you're taking that based on the decline of 35% and 24 to 25 of people.

Those saying they're taking a wait and see approach. No. So this was based on a, um, report from Gartner, right?

So these are two different, um, questions that were asked to them, to the customers. So in this one, uh, the 75% is, is the customers who are looking at the valuation, and then a subset of them were looking at, Hey, instead of taking a wait see approach, I'm going to kind of go and figure out what, what, what is the alternative option that we have right now? Oh, Okay.

I'm good. 24%, I mean, 2024. Mm-hmm.

55% did not say they're taking a weight and seal. That's right. But that increase to 75% who did not say they're taking a weight and sea, that's where the numbers on.

Right? But that's What I think, that's my point Scale or something saying, I'm looking, I'm definitely looking, I'm back. That's right.

And one of the options was, I'm gonna wait and see, okay. The number has gone down. Alright.

As long as there was the, yeah. 'cause I, yeah, you see where I'm going with this? 'cause that was vague.

It could've been that they just, okay, Stop looking. Sit down research. Yeah.

Thank you. Similar sound like you're good. Well, there is a link to the Gartner, uh, thing too, if you guys wanna take a look at it.

Uh, there's more details there. Thanks For clearing that up. You're welcome.

So, which leads to our conversation today, um, HB morphs VM essential software, right? So as Brad mentioned, um, we bought morphs end of last year. Um, and one of the gyms hidden in there, uh, stack was this KVM alternative.

They've, they've used in, in their own environments as well as some of the customers in their beta environments. So we felt that, you know, it's, it's a great opportunity for us to kind of bring, um, morphs VM Essentials as a product with a lot of the enterprise functionality, right? Uh, I mean, of course, uh, KVM has been there in the industry for quite a long time.

A lot of other vendors use KVM as a stack as well. But what's missing is the enterprise grade features. It could be high availability DRS, your storage integrations, your networking integrations, so forth, right?

So what we've done in the last, uh, 10 to 12 months is kind of build on that and provide our customers with an alternative, uh, stack that they can start leveraging. Now, if you double click on the stack itself, um, you know, there's, there's two different products that we sell at HPE. One is of course the, the virtualization product, which is called Morpheus VM Essentials.

And, and then the big daddy, right? The big brother of VM Essentials, which is the MORPHOS Enterprise. Um, so again, depends on what the customer's looking for.

So they have these two tiers that they could pick from, right? So if you look at the VM essentials, uh, a bit, you know, um, what we focus here, here is, is more so on the hypervisor and the tooling that allows them to manage the virtualization environment, right? Um, we do the, the, the big differentiation that we provide here is that from a single pane of glass, which is the VME manager, you can manage both VMware infrastructure as well as your HVM, which is h hp VM clustering, right?

Uh, which is very, very important. And I'll, I'll, I will talk about that in a minute. Uh, but kind of gives the customers a hybrid virtualization environmental management, right?

Um, along with that, we also have other important tooling, uh, you know, things around your integration with your IAM, uh, your DNS, your backup, you know, all those integrations comes as part of the base product itself, right? Um, as I mentioned, I manage the private cloud Business Edition product portfolio too. So, uh, all of our, uh, platforms that comes with private cloud Business Edition also gets VM Essentials as a mandatory component of it, right?

So customers get a choice point to deploy VM Essentials as a software runtime, um, outside of, uh, of what they're doing, right? So, Kim? Mm-hmm.

So on this chart, there's a bunch of stuff that's faded out. Yes. Is that why?

Yeah. So why that is faded out is because when, when you kind of add an additional license, which is Morpheus Enterprise, okay, you unlock a lot more functionality, okay? So all the demo that Brad showed as the enterprise product is, gets unlocked, right?

So the difference between the base package and then the enterprise is that you get a lot more functionalities around managing other private clouds, managing public clouds, doing automation around all of those, right? Integrating with ITSM tooling, such as, um, you know, your ServiceNow, your BMC and other things, right? So with the base HVM or VME package, you don't get that.

It's more focused on the virtualization, right? Does that answer your question? Yeah.

Okay, great. So, um, Brad touched on, um, you know, the Morpheus enterprise as a whole, but I also wanna highlight that we also have another, uh, product, uh, private cloud product now portfolio called Private Cloud Enterprise. So that uses the full blown Morpheus enterprise as is native tooling, right?

Because, um, it, it has stuff around bare metal provisioning. It has, it can support, you know, any public cloud, um, provisioning and management, right? So all that kind of comes into the private cloud enterprise portfolio.

So this is kind of how it plays into our holistic, um, portfolio itself. Now, um, this slide actually, I present because this allows, um, a lot of our customers to understand how, you know, when they're coming from a VMware perspective, how these two products fit into the, the modeling, right? So if you look at the, uh, the top level enterprise product, that kind of fits the bill of more of a VCF plus ARIA automation, right?

Um, which is what Morpheus Enterprise carries, right? In fact, Morpheus does more than VCF, um, you know, there's a lot of gaps in, in, in terms of public cloud or being agnostic to managing other platform types, whereas Morphs Enterprise does all those stuff, right? And if you look at the, the base layer, uh, with VM Essentials, uh, you can compare that with, uh, standard vSphere Enterprise or VVF along with the vCenter, uh, console that comes with it, right?

So kind of an approximate equivalency of how these two platforms compare. So if I'm a customer that just has vSphere Enterprise, or Enterprise plus VM Essentials is going to, would be a replacement, essentially. That's Correct.

So you're positioning it. Yeah. So you would start with that if you just need a virtualization alternative.

Um, so the beauty here is you can start with just the base package, and all you have to do is a license upgrade, and then you can unlock the other features of Morph, then Aria Automation, vCenter, ESXI was built by one engineering team and one consistent coherent code base and ran over the last 10 years together. That's what, that's what Morpheus has. We've just hidden a number of the features for a downmarket more simplified use case, but you apply a new license and they actually stack on top of each other, all of a sudden your two bedroom condo, uh, got unlocked and you, uh, you got a five bedroom house with a three car garage.

So that's, uh, that's the way to think about it in a hot Tub. I, I had one on, on the, the essentials that, uh, one of the, the bold words that were sticking out to me was the, uh, the identity management and, and SSO role-based access. Is that, is that a tie in to I, I'm sorry, Nathan Nielsen from WWT, um, is that a tie in for like, to ClearPass, or is that Its its own, um, identity solution for identity management?

Do you want, can we Integrate with any, so yeah, I'm gonna stand on the X I'm getting yelled at, I guess. Um, so yeah, it ties into, you know, a d Okta, you know, any SSO, you know, SAML provider map groups and roles, and then you're off and running. So, so there isn't a ClearPass requirement, but it can utilize ClearPass.

Okay, very good. Well fall into whatever corporate identity provider company have. Got It.

Thank you. Yeah, the beauty here is that, you know, the RA capabilities and morphy has already had applies here, right? So it's pretty extensive.

Um, and that's why we feel we are way ahead of the game. And some of, you know, we are not starting from scratch in terms of virtualization environment. So a lot of those capabilities already apply here.

Okay, so moving on, um, again, double clicking on some of the, uh, components here, right? But just to lay out the terminology and the branding and how this works out, because everybody's so used to VMware. Um, so the top two layers is your products, right?

So you have the enterprise software, and then you have VM essentials, but then the management interface is the same across both, right? Whether you choose to use the enterprise software or the VM essentials, you will manage through a VME manager, right? So, uh, or the enterprise manager, if you wanna call it, but as, as Brad mentioned, it's the code base is the same.

So the look and feel, everything would be the same. It's just that some of the options would be missing for the VM essentials. When you unlock Morpheus, you, you'll unlock all the other stuff too, right?

Uh, but in terms of cluster, the server host just replace ESXI with HVM, and you would get the, uh, the different components in it, right? So it's kind of the, how the stack plays out. Um, so we talked about hardening.

I'm not gonna, uh, go through that more, but, you know, all of the stack components that we use in KVM or chemo is pretty, pretty extensive. A lot more contribution, the open source community there. Um, all of this is also backed by our RA storage, uh, MP block, 10,000 array.

Um, you know, we've, we've had this disaggregated storage, uh, for quite some time right now. Um, and we have a extensive plugin architecture into the storage, right? Right.

From data store provisioning, your snapshotting, your management of the storage resources, all that could be managed as a plugin within your VME manager itself, right? Um, the other beauty here is, uh, we've in fact validated all of, um, HP hardware. You know, you could get any Proline servers, uh, gen 10 plus Gen 11, it's supported there.

Mp, of course, I mentioned about it. Uh, we also support, uh, third party hardware. Um, so, uh, the thing here is, you know, when we launched VM Essentials, our intent was not just to be supported within HP's ecosystem, but you can bring your own infrastructure and, and run this as a, a runtime on top, right?

So let's say you have a Dell, um, I never thought I would say this in a million years, but let's say you have pure storage or NetApp storage attached to your Dell servers, you can layer on VM Essentials on top and run, run that right as a runtime. So thereby, you know, giving customers a protection for their hardware investment, um, you know, because not all lifecycle, uh, refreshments of hardware and software aligned in many companies. So this gives them the flexibility to kind of run with existing infrastructure.

Um, we are also working extensively with backup vendors. Um, you know, we recently announced the partnership with Veeam and what we are doing there. Um, so early next year, we soon going to have a full blown GA of Veeam backup and recovery, um, with, with, with the VMs that we provisioned.

So the time of provisioning, you can protect them, get all the policies, uh, showing up, uh, provisioning, uh, the protection policy showing up in VME Manager. So that's, that's a great integration. We already have Commvault that was recently announced.

Um, so that's already available. And of course, Cohesity is something we're working on. Um, the beauty here is because Morphia is already integrated with a lot of these vendors prior for VMware.

Um, so that policy is al already available through VME manager, right? So let's say if you're managing a VMware infrastructure, all these backup provisioning policies is already available. Just to be clear, you said Cohesity is something you're working on not yet available For?

Yes. So Cohesity is something we are working on for the VME based VMs. Okay.

That's not yet available. Okay. But it is available for VMware based VMs that could also be managed to vme.

Got It. Uh, rubric is a name that's conspicuously missing and very popular in the industry. Is it somewhere on the roadmap?

Yes. I mean, definitely the rubric is, uh, close fourth here in this list, but yes, um, we are actively in discussions with them. That's why it doesn't show up here.

But yes, we are actively working with them as well. And we have agent based backup for anybody, right? That's the, that's the easy part.

But doing, you know, full image based backup is, uh, is where they're having to integrate into the KVM stack itself. So those are the ones coming kind of next level. That's right.

Actually, that's a good point because Veeam already carries, um, agent based backup. If you really wanna do that, you can do that. But, you know, if you have a lot of VMs, it's difficult to manage.

So these, all these are image based backup solutions Management Between VMware and VM Essentials. One of the things I'm not seeing on here is some sort of migration service to get off of Yes. A VMware platform.

Yeah. Is that something that's forthcoming in the solution? No, it's, uh, we already have it.

We are gonna show a demo of that today. Okay. So if you can hold onto your question, we'll carry that.

Yeah. Perfect. Okay.

So I talked about, um, you know, managing both the solutions together, right? So as you can see at the hypervisor level, you can have both vSphere and the HVM hypervisor and manage it from a single pane of glass through VME manager, right? And all the other capabilities we talked about, IAM your provisioning, your management, all carries to that, right?

So it's, uh, it's omnipresent there. Um, the other thing here is the underlying storage. For example, if you're using a B 10 K, you can have two different clusters, right?

Uh, one running HV M1 running via the vSphere stacked on top of the same storage. So you can provision lungs and volumes and manage it through the same console. 'cause we have plugins for both of those hypervisor clusters, right?

And your VME manager will have an API call talking back to vCenter. So, you know, once, the only, the only reason you would have to go back to a vCenter is to set up the advanced, uh, policies, right? It could be DRS or ha.

Uh, but once you do that, your provisioning, your management can all be done through your VM e VM essentials manager, right? So kind of gives you a one stop shop to manage your entire infrastructure. Uh, I talked about the validated hardware.

Uh, we also work extensively, extensively with a lot of ISVs. You know, one of the, the key benefits of staying on VMware is their extensive, uh, integrations with you name the software vendor. They have integrations with them, right?

Uh, hp with this ecosystem, we have a complete, um, um, HP complete service that, in fact, we partner with pretty, uh, different vendors, uh, in the ISV space. So we actively working as we speak on that, um, you know, going with them. Alright, so, um, I, I talked about a couple of things with, uh, how we integrate this private cloud.

Um, so as you can see, we support two different platforms with private cloud. On the left is what we call as a disaggregated head ci, where it's a three tier architecture. You can scale compute and storage independently.

So that's one platform that VME integrates today. Um, on the right is SimpliVity, right? We acquired SimpliVity probably seven, eight years ago.

Uh, it provides you with a hyperconverged infrastructure. So for customers who wants, uh, you know, a smaller profile, low cost, um, platform, SimpliVity is your choice point too, right? So VM Essentials is supported, um, with both these platforms.

I mean, of course, customers can prefer to even install VMware. Um, so they, they support both of those one times today. Just double clicking on, uh, the, uh, DHCI stack itself.

The beauty here is, uh, the day zero, day one operation on setup. You know, your firmware software of your hardware, your, all the components in the stack is automated, right? We ship a lot of these software from the factory, so it's a very turnkey, uh, type of deployment.

And also for day two operations for LCM, right? Lifecycle management, uh, there is a software catalog that we provide where we stack, we pretest and pre validate a lot of these, uh, um, software and firmware components so that, you know, the guesswork is taken out of the customer, right? This is very more, more important for VME because there's not a lot of subject matter expertise on KVM or Linux administration in the, in the, in the field.

So what we've done is we've packaged this as one, so you don't have to worry about, you know, upgrading your kernel or upgrading your KVM. We validate and put that as a software, uh, component, and then we would do it as a one click update, right? So you don't have to, uh, you know, manage the hypervisor stack itself.

All right? So the next platform, of course, is SimpliVity. Uh, one thing I wanna highlight on SimpliVity is, um, you know, the, the big IP on SimpliVity is, is deep duping compression, right?

You know, it's used for retail and other type of deployments for Edge Edge deployments. Um, the way that, you know, the native duping compression and the data efficiency that simpl has is, uh, it's second to none, right? I don't think there's any platform in the market that can do that.

Um, it also in a two node architecture, because of the rate and rain architecture that it has, it has, you know, resiliency and high availability built into it. So again, for customers looking for a, a fast deployment of a two node architecture, this could be another platform type that you can manage. Um, so I'll, I'll extend the slide, but it kind of walks over how VME and morphs plays into the entire private cloud portfolio, which we touched on.

So I'm now gonna lea the point here. So with that, I want to hand it over to Daniel, um, just to talk about, uh, different features and we'll talk about the migration capability as well, um, and probably show a demo of that. Yeah.

Uh, thanks Barath. Um, so just kind a at a high level, you know, what we bring as far to part of, um, Morpheus VM essential software. Uh, and again, just to kind of hit on that point, this is a subset of the features that are within Morpheus Enterprise.

So, you know, all of these capabilities are there within Morpheus Enterprise as well. Um, but in the, the basic level VM essential software, we have that multi hypervisor support giving the ability to deploy and manage both h HP's own HBM hypervisor, as well as integrating with your existing, uh, VMware environment. So you can manage, uh, virtual workloads on both of those at the same time, uh, it does contain, uh, kind of a subset of the provisioning automation capabilities.

That morphy enterprise that we have in there are, you know, VMHA, uh, dynamic workload schedulers. So, you know, that protected at the cluster lay level. So if a host goes down, VMs will automatically power up on another host.

If you're using shared storage, you know, the workload schedule will scheduler, will balance placement within a cluster. Uh, we have, uh, affinity and anti affinity rules in there. That's kind of a relatively recent edition.

You know, the ability, if you need VMs, you wanna say grouped together or kept apart, you can put them in one of those. Okay, go back to my, my question on the black versus the green. What does that Mean?

Our newer features is, uh, Yeah, so Daniel, sorry, there's a question here. Um, so this is more to highlight some of the key, uh, capabilities, right? It's all these features available as part of VM Essentials.

So what we, what Daniel's gonna showcase is some of the green elements as a demo, uh, just to give you more perspective on that. So Daniel, why don't we, uh, move to your demo. Um, let's showcase the, um, the migration capability.

Excellent. Um, so after the, the Morpheus Enterprise demo, this should interface should look very familiar. Uh, you know, the UI is the same ui, just, you know, kind of a, like I said, a subset of features.

So kind of at the top level, uh, the things I want to touch on really quickly. So if we go into provisioning, we can see our virtual machines. And in the case of, uh, let's say this virtual machine, we can go in and we can manage where this VM is running.

Uh, you know, so we can go in, do managed placement. This is also where that dynamic resource scheduler is built in. So, you know, I can initiate a host migration from here, have it migrate between hosts, you know, if it's powered on, it's a live migration, you know, there's no, no downtime there.

And then by default, we have these placement strategies. So auto, um, if auto placement is there, it'll try to balance the workload from a memory and VCPU perspective across the cluster, uh, failover. We'll keep it on whatever host it's on, unless the host encounters a failure, in which case it'll bring up on another host, or it will do hint, in which case it will keep it on that host no matter what.

Um, host goes down, it won't, it won't bring it up. Maybe you have a VM that you, you want to keep in one place, uh, then that would be, you know, what you would leverage there. So I think this is implying, uh, the answer to my question, but is it initial placement or ongoing where the VM will be located or both?

Meaning, meaning, Yes. Okay. Yeah, it is, it is both.

Um, when you, when you create the vm, uh, you can just leave the default auto placement, in which case it'll decide where we want it to go. Or you can choose an individual host of, you know, if you have a specific host, you want it to be on. So you, you have options either way of when you deploy it.

One of the other pieces we have here, so if we go into our cluster here, this is my, my HVM cluster, and we go in under resources, and this is relatively new. This is, you know, our, our Affinity group feature that we added, I think in the release before last. And if we go, you know, add, um, I, you know, you can specify, you know, whether you keep them separated or together, you know, this is gonna be an area where we're gonna have some enhancements coming as well.

Uh, but in this case, I'm gonna say, okay, you know, that VM and this VM and this vm, you know, I want all of these to be separated and I've got a three node cluster. So what it will do is it will attempt, you know, if I apply those VMs and say those changes, it will try to keep those VMs separated across, you know, no matter what. Now availability in HA is always going to be the preference.

So if it can, you know, for some reason it can't keep them separated, it will still ensure that your VMs are, are up and running. So Daniel, if I can interject, if you can just focus on the VM migration, um, I think running, running out of time, so I just wanna focus on that because that's an important element. Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, so again, a relatively recent edition. This came in the 8 0 8 release. Uh, so I have connected this environment to my vSphere environment as well as manage my my HVM cluster.

And, uh, creating a migration plan, uh, is relatively straightforward. So we choose, you know, what cluster we're, what VMware cluster we're pulling it from, what VM essentials cluster we want it to go to. And then we go and we choose, uh, whatever, whatever VMs that we have, uh, that we want to want to pull in.

These are all in my, my VMware environment. Once I have those selected, um, I choose a target for whatever, uh, VMware networks they're on to whatever networks on the VM essential side, uh, as well as whatever data stores. So if those VMs have multiple VM nicks and multiple vm, you know, multiple VM dks spread across multiple data stores, I can specify different destinations for all those as well.

And then here you'd specify, you know, like what your admin password would be, um, because one of the things that we'll try to do is it'll try to install the, the Morpheus guest agent, um, which will enable, you know, the, um, manager to have direct access to initiate, you know, things like scripts and monitor and get logs and everything. So, uh, once that is done, uh, you know, the job is ready to go and it will go through and do this. Now, there are some, uh, some prerequisites, some things you need to do currently, you know, you do do some like, you know, vert IO driver installation.

Uh, we do have all that documented and covered pretty thoroughly. So, um, that is another area that we're, we're gonna be enhancing. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Um, to go one step deeper on the tech side of it, are you doing some sort of conversion of the disc, or are you, uh, are you changing it from VMDK to ke uh, KEMU KE Q code? Yes.

Yes. Yep, yep. Yes.

Uh, we are, uh, so basically what we do is once you initiate the, once you initiate that migration plan, uh, what that'll do is initiates the export on the VMware side. Uh, while that file is being copied over to us, uh, we go through the process of actually doing the conversion while that is streaming. So you don't have to use double the disk space, but we do convert it from A-V-M-D-K format to the, the Q count two, uh, disk format.

And, uh, I may miss it. Is this capability something that was built into Morpheus, or is it using Zerto, which is a very popular migration tool, or something homegrown Within, uh, this is, this is built, well, this is built into the Morpheus ui. This is a part of, part of the tool is, you know, just part of the product that's built in.

So whether you have VM Essentials or Morpheus Enterprise, uh, that, uh, that migrations tool is there. Uh, it does not leverage Zerto. It is, its, uh, uh, own, own separate tool.

Yeah, I mean, the migration is also offline. Um, so not an online migration. I just wanna highlight that.

Yeah. Sort of on that note, is it, is it, does this also tie into GreenLake, or is this just completely separate? So it ties into GreenLake, uh, with the fact that how you deploy it, let's say we deploy it as part of the private cloud products, it's all onboard into GreenLake, and that's how it ties it.

But the majority of the management that you see here is OnPrem. Okay, got it. It's more like the key center, so it runs OnPrem.

Yeah. Got it. And what about from like a, is the local UI from like a telemetry perspective and stuff, those are stuff that, that is being fed into?

Yeah, so, uh, morphs itself has a lot of telemetry that we get. So a lot of those API calls are taken into the product and then we showcase into GreenLake products. Yeah, there's dashboards, you know, there's different tiles for private cloud, business Edition, or SimpliVity.

So we show those telemetry there. Thank you. All right.

So I'm gonna, um, uh, wrap up here because, uh, we have another, uh, topic to ca go forward, but I think this gives you a taste of what we are building and where we are going with this product. So thanks.