HPE Private Cloud With Morpheus VM Essentials Provides ‘Astronomical’ 10X Cost Savings Versus Broadcom VMware: Partners

‘For compute-intensive applications you are going to have a lot of cores per socket,’ says CPP Associates partner and sales director Paul O’Dell. ‘That is where HPE crushes Broadcom VMware.’

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s new Private Cloud Business Edition With Morpheus VM Essentials is going to provide customers grappling with steep Broadcom VMware software licensing price increases with cost savings of as much as ten times less than Broadcom VMware Private Cloud Foundation, HPE partners told CRN.

“The cost savings with HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with Morpheus VM Essentials is astronomical in compute-intensive scenarios versus VMware Private Cloud Foundation and vSphere Enterprise Plus,” said Paul O’Dell, a partner who heads up the sales force for HPE partner CPP Associates, Clinton, New Jersey. “We have done 40 VMware-focused CPP Infrastructure Anywhere virtualization optimization assessments and are finding on average cost savings of five to 10x. The VMware pricing is outrageous.”

HPE unveiled the HPE Private Cloud Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials on Wednesday with a pledge to reduce VM license costs by more than 10x with multi-hypervisor support and self-service cloud consumption. HPE Morpheus is now generally available for Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials for virtualized workloads and HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software for hybrid cloud management.

HPE is pricing its HPE Morpheus VMware Essentials on Private Cloud Business Edition on a per-socket basis rather than on the per-core processor pricing model that Broadcom initiated after it acquired VMware for $61 billion in November 2023.

O’Dell said one CPP customer currently evaluating its VMware environment with 32 24-core systems is looking at conservatively $460,800 in Broadcom VMware licensing charges versus $38,400 for HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with VM Essentials.

“The one year savings of not doing HPE Private Cloud With HPE Morpheus VM Essentials pays a large part, if not all, of the total cost of new HPE infrastructure when you look at the VMware licensing charges over three years” he said. “For compute intensive applications you are going to have a lot of cores per socket. That is where HPE crushes Broadcom VMware. There is 3-4x savings at 16 cores per socket. When you start hitting 18, 24, or 32 cores, HPE blows Broadcom VMware out of the water. I don’t know what VMware is talking about when they refer to lowest total cost of ownership, but they are going to need a real good story to overcome their pricing.”

VMware-Broadcom, for its part, believes its VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation bundles provide a better TCO (total cost of ownership) versus the competition. “Our sophistication in pooling and sharing resources and in automation has resulted in our approach having the lowest total cost of ownership compared to any other solution in public cloud or on-prem,” said Broadcom CEO Hock Tan recently.

Broadcom VMware would not comment on the HPE Private Cloud Business Edition With HPE Morpheus VM Essentials comparison versus Broadcom VMware.

HPE Is Rapidly Closing The Gap With VMware

Partners, however, told CRN that HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with VM Essentials is a big leap forward, providing dramatic cost savings and total cost of ownership advantages versus Broadcom VMware.

“HPE is rapidly closing the gap between what it can do versus what VMware is doing,” O’Dell said. “Incorporating more of the Morpheus features into what VM Essentials is doing is pivotal. Morpheus was a virtualization platform prior to the HPE acquisition (in August 2024). It has taken them nine months to pull this all together. HPE had a crawl, walk, run-type strategy for Morpheus. Now they are approaching the run stage!”

CPP is providing customers with a full managed service offering to run HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with Morpheus VM Essentials ion a 24 x 7 network operations center in Clinton, New Jersey. “We are already managing customer tier one workloads,” he said. “We’re looking forward to providing the same service for HPE Private Cloud Business With Morpheus VM Essentials.”

CPP is finding with its Infrastructure Anywhere VMware-focused assessments that there is a lot of “technical waste” that has taken hold in customer environments, said O’Dell (pictured above).

“When VMware was the low-priced licensing model it didn’t matter,” he said. “VMware went from a low-priced model to an expensive licensing model really fast. What we are finding is customers are now looking at things more carefully to optimize their virtual environment. At the same time they are optimizing they are spreading out their risk. They don’t want to be a one-trick pony with VMware anymore.”

The “beauty” of the HPE strategy is it allows customers to run Broadcom VMware side by side with VMware so customers can take their time “migrating” to the HPE Morpheus VM Essentials solution, said O’Dell. “Because of the cost savings with HPE a customer can do a one-year VMware extension and bring in an HPE Morpheus three-year deal and when you sunset VMware in year two you are running production in a tried and true tested environment with HPE. That’s a safe and secure way to get yourself out of VMware jail.”

Besides the software licensing savings, HPE is offering a full cloud stack encompassing server, storage and networking with cutting edge innovation and multicloud capabilities that provides increased value, functionality and flexibility of choice versus Broadcom VMware, said O’Dell.

Excited About HPE Innovation Versus Broadcom-VMware

“From our perspective there is not a tremendous amount of innovation happening at Broadcom VMware,” he said. “HPE is innovating. When you look at the multicloud management capabilities of Morpheus there is a lot there for customers.”

O’Dell said he is particularly excited about the innovation that comes from pairing HPE Morpheus VM Essentials with Alletra MP storage in the form of the HPE B10000 and the HPE StoreOnce backup and recovery appliances: the StoreOnce 3720 and 3760 models with ransomware protection.

“You can’t run VMware on top of a refrigerator,” he said. “It runs on servers, storage and networks. It all works together. Nobody can touch what HPE is delivering with Private Cloud Business Edition with Alletra MP. It is a completely innovative solution with a cyber resilience guarantee.”

O’Dell said customers are “afraid” that VMware may raise prices yet again on top of the already hefty price increases they have seen in the last year. “You don’t know what VMware is going to do,” he said. “Did anyone think they would wake up and find that their prices for VMware would go up 10x? We have dozens of customers that have a really ingrained VMware infrastructure that is not that easy to unwind. They cannot wait to get VMware out of their environment. They just don’t know how to do it yet. HPE is getting close to being able to provide them a path forward.”

O’Dell said like VMware customers, CPP felt “helpless” in the wake of the VMware changes. “VMware railroaded the entire industry and extracted the maximum amount of money out of customers and partners,” he said. “The tide always turns. Things have a way of working themselves out.”

Bob Panos, president of American Digital, Schaumburg, Ill., a top HPE partner, said he is also seeing a 10x reduction in licensing costs for customers versus Broadcom VMware with HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials.

“It’s simple math when you look at VMware Cloud Foundation at $350 per core versus $600 per socket with VM Essentials,” he said. “And now VMware is saying you need a 72-core minimum. A two-socket server for VM Essentials is $1,200. For VMware if you have 72 cores it is $25,200. That’s more than 20x the cost of VM Essentials!”

American Digital is in the process of building out its own proof of concept lab so customers can test and demo HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials.

The Benefits Of A Full Enterprise Grade Stack

Panos praised HPE for stepping up with a full enterprise-grade hybrid cloud technology virtualization stack all tightly integrated and backed up with comprehensive HPE services capabilities. “You’ve now got the compute, storage, network fabric, the hypervisor and the orchestration, which is being done by Morpheus, all integrated and owned by HPE so there is less for the customer to worry about,” he said. “It’s a big investment from HPE.”

Panos said there is a “huge” opportunity for the American Digital team to sell a fully integrated private cloud stack. “We see an opportunity to go into customers with Cisco and Dell stuck in a VMware environment and provide an integrated alternative that has a better total cost of ownership,” he said.

“Everybody wants an alternative to VMware given what Broadcom has done with VMware licensing,” Panos said. “Customers want either an alternative or long term they want an off ramp if they can make it work. Broadcom VMware may still be strategic in many enterprises. The problem is it is not a partnership anymore. It feels like they are just coming after customers and trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of them. That is the customer and partner perception. They have alienated a lot of us. There are a lot of people upset. The majority of conversations we are having are around VM Essentials. This is going to be a hot topic at the HPE Discover conference next month.”

Steve Lankard, vice president of business alliances and infrastructure solutions for CBTS, the $1.3 billion HPE Platinum partner, said he walked away from a recent partner advisory board meeting with HPE’s top executives, including CEO Antonio Neri, CTO Fidelma Russo, and Americas Managing Director Paul Hunter, pumped up about the HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials opportunity.

“HPE is aggressively building a viable modern virtualization platform that has got my attention,” he said. “It is not just a hypervisor alternative. HPE made a great investment in buying Morpheus. They saw some gems in Morpheus and they are putting the development cycles and attention into it to build into an enterprise class virtualization platform.”

Coupling Morpheus with Private Cloud Business Edition provides “cost reduction and simplification of management with no proprietary platform lock in,” said Lankard.

“HPE differentiates with the breadth and depth of its development capabilities and the breadth, depth and quality of its global enterprise support,” he said. “It is pretty compelling. If you look at the feature comparisons HPE has high availability for VMs, live migration for VMs, snapshots for VMs, storage migration. They have tools that provide migrations from a source hypervisor to a VM Essentials hypervisor. They support software defined and external based storage. So they are checking all the boxes. I would say 90 percent of the feature customers expect in an enterprise virtualization platform are already in place and the remaining 10 percent are going to be developed very soon.”

CBTS is already seeing customer interest in the HPE Private Cloud Business Edition with Morpheus VM Essentials. “We are starting to see customers proof of value and proof of concept,” he said. “HPE has done a great job making their internal training available to partners. We are taking advantage of that and putting our professional services and presales people through that training. We are even having our own managed services team take a look at this. HPE is putting all of the force of the company behind this offering because they see the market opportunity. CBTS is paying attention to it and bringing it to our customers for their consideration.”