Morpheus is licensed on an annual basis for the number of concurrent workload elements (WEs) that may be provisioned at any one time. You can provision and destroy as many WEs as you’d like provided the total inventoried at any time does not exceed the limit according to your license.
When this limit is exceeded, discovery and provisioning will be stopped until the total WE load is reduced or a new license is issued. We also support ‘on-demand’ or flexible bursting beyond the reserved WE amount similar to what you would find in public cloud pricing plans.
A workload element (WE) is the unit of measure directly associated with an application service (DB, Web Server, Base VM, etc.), whether they be discovered and inventoried when a cloud is integrated or provisioned from Morpheus itself.
It could be a bare metal server, a single VM or cluster of VMs, a Container Deployment or ReplicaSet, or a cloud-native PaaS service. Thinking about the application service is the only way to normalize across all these platform technologies.
Since Morpheus adds significant cloud management value even to unmanaged resources (analytics, rightsizing, cost tracking, etc.), these are still counted as WEs for licensing purposes. You can also convert discovered instances to fully managed to unlock advanced automation features. However, administrators can opt out of automatic cloud resource inventorying if they choose.
The easiest proxy for calculating the number of WEs needed for an environment is to consider the total number of VMs managed by all hypervisors and clouds utilized. That said, there are still some nuanced example cases which are described below:
Because we work nearly 100% through channel partners, we don’t publish a price sheet online but most of our customers start at 500 workloads and scale to 50,000 or more. It’s a tiered model so higher volume tiers have a much lower cost per workload. Price can range based on length of term and total number of workloads.
As a point of comparison, if you look at the list price of vRealize Automation (vRA) at $8,000 per CPU and a VM density of 20 VMs per CPU you get a $400 per VM list price for vRA. And that’s not including the time and professional services expense to knit together all the plug-ins and scripts you’ll need. This example is based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Enterprise which is where vRA is bundled for multi-cloud automation. If you pair Morpheus with VCF Standard you get the best of VMware and Morpheus at a fraction of the cost with more flexibility and zero lock-in.
On the other end of the spectrum there are challengers who specialize in small workgroup automation projects with 100 or so VMs and may charge $40 per VM. In this case, you get what you pay for; if you are an SMB with basic needs then those platforms are probably a great start. We’ll be here when you’re ready to grow up or we’re happy to talk about our special starter packages to get you on the right path from the beginning.
The full Morpheus Enterprise platform includes nearly 100 codeless integrations into third-party technologies and supports over 20 private and public cloud platforms.
However, we know some customers just want the basics so we’ve introduced Morpheus Essentials starting at a lower price point for environments as small as 200 workloads. You can also flexibly scale with true consumption based on-demand billing.
Contact Morpheus or one of our certified partners for more information on Morpheus Essentials or upgrade to full Morpheus Enterprise for access to third-party integrations like ServiceNow, Infoblox, F5, Splunk, and more.
Want to get the details on the differences between Morpheus Essentials and Morpheus Enterprise? Request a demo today and we’ll help you decide which version is right for you.