Apr 2025
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Product
Morpheus Hardening Guide: 8.x
It’s been over six months since Morpheus joined forces with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in an acquisition that has been the talk of the tech town. We have been busy at work coming up with ways to bring hybrid cloud and virtualization solutions accessible to everyone looking to ease their IT pains and keep up with the ever-evolving tech landscape. During this short time, the HPE offering has leveraged Morpheus in bountiful ways and aims to continue the momentum and become the first OEM vendor with robust hardware AND software offerings.
A quick recap of Morpheus and why HPE decided to invest
Morpheus was founded in 2015 by a group of developers within a private equity firm who sought to simplify their IT operations. Their creation worked so well they decided to sell it as a standalone software solution. Thus, Morpheus was born.
The hybrid cloud management solution grew to be the top choice of hundreds of enterprise companies and service providers looking to streamline their platform operations – with success aplenty and continued loyalty to follow.
Morpheus garnered the interest of various investors over the years with its unique, efficient, and cost-savings solution. In the end, it ended up winning the hearts of the folks at HPE, thanks to its existing successful partnership and the fact that Morpheus already powered a good chunk of the HPE private cloud offering.
It was a mutual decision; as pointed out in our acquisition announcement blog, by joining forces with HPE, we will be able to leverage their extensive resources, industry expertise, and global reach to enhance our ability to deliver even more innovative solutions and better serve our customers. With the addition of Morpheus, HPE will be the first vendor to offer a full suite of hybrid cloud capabilities for traditional, cloud-native, and AI workloads for commercial, public sector, and service providers around the globe.
The 6-Month check-in: HPE VM Essentials was born
There was no wasting time once the acquisition was complete! HPE CTO Fidelma Russo saw the value in Morpheus, and also knew the team was cooking up a virtualization and hypervisor solution in response to the Broadcom acquisition of VMware and the changes customers are facing. In the short span of about three months, HPE VM Essentials was born.
The announcement was publicly made at HPE Discover in Barcelona in November, and it quickly became the talk of the event. Not only were there several presentations, but Morpheus and HPE ran hands-on labs for customers and partners to get a test drive of the solution! HPE and Morpheus are helping to extend the VMware virtualization foundation as customers are thinking about their runtime strategies. HPE VM Essentials can unify VMware and KVM to provide simple VM-vending into both stacks. It is available as a standalone software, as well. Check out the product page here!
The beta program was successful; there were happy customers and feedback was useful before we launched GA in the US in December. Worldwide access occurred right around the 6-month mark.
Moving forward, VM Essentials will be sold 100 percent through HPE’s channel partners. This is a huge opportunity for partners looking to ease their customers’ concerns in the wake of VMware/Broadcom. HPE is offering a 10.5 percent rebate to partners selling VM Essentials, and a chance to wrap their own services around the software, so to speak. Read more about the benefits of this model here.
While VM Essentials is a large focus for the various teams at HPE, it’s definitely paving the road for customers to realize the value of the full Morpheus stack.
What’s to come in the short term?
As of middle of February, the Morpheus solution is being re-branded as “HPE Morpheus Software,” so the heart and soul of the product is still there. The HPE team is focused on creating a unified software stack for not only virtualization, but also hybrid cloud orchestration. Now that Morpheus is officially part of the mix, this goal is more easily achievable.
Yes, Morpheus is still available as standalone software, as well as the driving force powering HPE offerings like GreenLake. But HPE is driven to integrate Morpheus into the private cloud portfolio completely to provide end-to-end hybrid cloud platform operations – including Private Cloud Enterprise (PCE) and Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE). Morpheus powers PCE with the orchestration of workload provisioning, along with VM Essentials, MKS and bare metal. With PCBE, HPE VM Essentials powers a simplified version of VM provisioning with an upgrade path to the rest of the features in PCE and beyond.
What about mid-term?
The beauty of an acquisition into a company as resource-heavy as HPE is being able to not only imagine the art of the possible, but to make the possible actually happen – not just in the hybrid cloud sphere, but everywhere!
This move is part of HPE’s grander plan; over the last few years, other solution acquisitions related to hybrid cloud completed to become part of the HPE solution. This includes disaster recovery company Zerto, cloud visibility and analytics company CloudPhysics, and observability company OpsRamp. Leveraging all of these components can help to complete your puzzle – from day zero to day 2 and beyond.
Come June of this year, HPE Discover in Las Vegas will also bring exciting announcements for Morpheus and, of course, all of HPE… so stay tuned.
Where can you go from here?
Enterprise organizations, service providers, and everyone in between looking to simplify their cloud environments while dodging the challenges that come with that management should look to HPE Morpheus Software, whether a current HPE customer or not.
For existing GreenLake customers who have bought elastic capacity, request a demo now to realize the full potential your environment can have.
For anyone evaluating their platform runtime choices, find out more information on the VME product page and download our 60-day free trial of HPE VM Essentials. You can also join our just-launched VME forum here!
We also have a wealth of training available to our partners and customers for both VME and for Morpheus, which we are adding to all the time. Go to https://learning.morpheusdata.com for a full selection of Morpheus trainings, from instructor-led to self-paced. Find all HPE learning and certifications here.
