HPE Aims Higher for Its VMware Alternative

To have a real chance of staking its claim against VMware, should HPE offer a free version rather than merely a trial?

The suggestion comes from Veeam’s product director. The backup specialist has said in recent weeks that it has been watching the development of this alternative named VM Essentials (VME). As with other hypervisors, it will consider a native integration if it achieves a decent market share.

Morpheus, at the Heart of the Reactor

A few days ago, this market was—at least on paper—limited to the United States. It is now officially global, on a 100% indirect model. At least for the standalone version of VM Essentials. HPE is indeed planning to market it within its Private Cloud offerings (there are already a few traces).

VME combines a stack KVM (a Type 2 hypervisor to be deployed, for now on Ubuntu 22.04) with part of Morpheus Data’s technologies, which HPE seized last year. It is these technologies that enable VMware deployments to be integrated… while adding a few elements not available by default in vCenter, such as Cloud-Init support and a basic image conversion (VHD/QCOW2 to VMDK).

Managing VMware Clusters… While Waiting for a Migration Path?

While Broadcom has shifted to per-core pricing, HPE has stuck with the old VMware model, on a socket. It offers licenses for 1, 3 or 5 years, with a 60-day trial period (maximum 6 sockets). There are no additional charges for connecting VMware clusters. The solution is currently certified only on ProLiant servers (Gen10, Gen11, Gen12). External storage is supported via iSCSI; Fibre Channel support is not yet available.

Three configurations are offered for the control plane: 2 vCPU and 12 GB of RAM (managing a VM Essentials cluster), 4 vCPU and 16 GB (up to 3 clusters) or 4 vCPU and 32 GB (up to 10 clusters). HPE claims gateways with third-party IP and DNS management solutions. It has integrated Cypher for secret management.

VME enables the use of containers (provisioning Docker hosts inside VMware). The vCenter integrations are scoped to a specific datacenter (they can potentially be scoped at the cluster or resource pool level). Snapshots synchronize every 5 minutes.