HPE’s VM Essentials Puts Partners Back In The ‘Virtualization Game’
'Having VM Essentials out there I think will be a catalyst for investment by the customers and that will drive business for the channel,’ says HPE Hybrid Cloud COO Hang Tan.
“This really puts partners back in the virtualization game,” said Tan (pictured above) in an interview with CRN. “A lot of customers have been putting infrastructure IT decisions on hold and delaying purchasing decisions and partners have been feeling it. Having VM Essentials out there I think will be a catalyst for investment by the customers and that will drive business for the channel.”
HPE unveiled VM Essentials at HPE Discover Barcelona conference along with backup and recovery services from Cohesity and Commvault.
[Related: Partners Cheer New HPE Virtualization Capability Being Showcased At HPE Discover]
The per-socket pricing on VM Essentials is in sharp contrast to the much-maligned per-core pricing model implemented by Broadcom after it acquired VMware in a $61 billion blockbuster acquisition.
That Broadcom VMware per-core pricing model combined with a reduced virtualization product portfolio has resulted in sharp prices increases that have been widely criticized by partners who have embraced VMware alternatives like Nutanix and Scale Computing.
Now HPE is entering the virtualization market for the first time with an open source-based KVM hypervisor that it promises will deliver an up to five times total cost of ownership advantage for enterprises moving to VM Essentials and HPE GreenLake cloud.
“Our per-socket pricing makes it very attractive for customers to re-platform from old infrastructure that is like five or six years old on to new modern sustainable, more secure infrastructure,” said Tan. “On top of that the partners can layer on the services to build a full private cloud with either a self-service or managed for you offering for the end customer. It really puts partners back into the game heading into 2025.”
Virtually every customer brings up virtualization as a ripe opportunity for HPE, said Tan. “Every customer we have spoken to the virtualization (topic) has come up,” he said. “I can’t size (the market) it for you right now but I am very bullish. We are hearing it everywhere.”
Even though partners see it as a head-to-head alternative to Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation model, Tan insisted VM Essentials as a standalone offering is “complementary” to the “mature full stack” VMware Cloud Foundation platform.
“They are a very strong partner of ours,” he said of VMware. “We are very committed to that relationship. But there are going to be other specific customer situations where they don’t need the full-stack capabilities. Those are workloads that can run on VM Essentials. I think it is going to be very complementary, and it is going to drive a lot of business both in terms of infrastructure and services for the partners.”
HPE partners have been eagerly awaiting the release of the new virtualization software since HPE unveiled it in June at the HPE Discover conference. At that time, partners greeted the announcement with a hearty round of applause and praised HPE for providing a trusted alternative.
HPE Executive Vice President and CTO Fidelma Russo told CRN at HPE Discover in June that the new hypervisor was a response to partner and customer demand for a virtualization partner that is “consistent,” “trustworthy,” and that they can have a “relationship” with going forward. “We would never have done this if we were not being pushed by customers,” said Russo.
HPE Vice President of GreenLake Partner and Service Provider Sales Ulrich (Uli) Seibold said HPE is hitting the market in the midst of all the “noises” and “frustration” that have beset partners. “Every partner tried to push us to help them with an alternative,” said Seibold. “We are now the alternative. It is complementary. It is not a replacement. But we are now the alternative.”
HPE’s prominent position as the hybrid cloud leader with hardware and software offerings provides the opportunity for partners to add their own “intellectual property” on top of VM Essentials and the HPE GreenLake platform, said Seibold. “This makes us so relevant for partners – not just for today- but even more into the future,” he said. “This is a huge market for us….We are super excited at this moment and the feedback from partners is phenomenal.”
In its press briefing on the new offering, HPE said there were more than 100 beta applications with strong praise from partners. Among the quotes HPE provided from beta testers: “Love your per-socket pricing…This is really coming together in a very integrated and concise way”; ‘The solution hit all the basics: VM creation, snaps, imaging, live migration, load balancing,’; ‘I’m impressed with the completeness of the solution. I can start using it directly in production.’
Tan, for his part, said VM Essentials opens the door for partners to “optimize and offset the cost increases” associated with their customers’ virtualization IT estate. Besides the attractive socket pricing, HPE’s CloudPhysics cloud financial assessment tool provides detailed recommendations for cost efficiency that takes into account hardware utilization rate and storage consolidation. “That’s a big piece the partners can offer their customers,” said Tan.
The call to action is for partners to move to get their customers to “modernize” with a “future proof” full hybrid cloud capability, said Tan.
HPE GreenLake provides an opportunity to simplify the hybrid cloud estate with the likes of Morpheus multicloud management and OpsRamp monitoring and automation, said Tan. “This is really about optimize, modernize and simplify,” he said.
Tan called the new VM Essentials standalone offering – which will be formally available in December – a much needed “modular” software offering demanded by partners that can run on HPE or third party hardware.
“When we announced this back at (HPE) Discover (in June), everybody was super excited but they also pulled us aside and told us it would be really good if we sold it standalone,” said Tan. “A lot of customers have recently made investments in their IT infrastructure and they want to be able to take advantage of that and protect that investment.”
Seibold said the message for midmarket focused partners is not to try to replace virtualization software licenses already in place but rather to focus on new workloads.
“If customers want to expand and extend instead of buying very expensive additional licenses we give them an offer for new workloads or for some new environments in a more efficient, essential way doing a virtual machine managed in an overall environment,” he said.
HPE did not release specific pricing on the new software. That said, partners told CRN they expect to see an attractive bundle with HPE private cloud solutions. In fact, some said, HPE is considering offering free virtualization subscription and support out of the gate for the Private Cloud Business Edition.
HPE said Private Cloud Business Edition with the VM Essentials software embedded will be available in Spring 2025
Tan said he sees the virtualization capability combined with HPE GreenLake Hybrid cloud as an opportunity for partners to help customers “rethink” their IT strategy for the future. In fact, he said, “forward thinking” partners see it as a “future proofing” opportunity for customers.
Morpheus is a critical element of the future proof IT estate, providing a self-service IT capability in multi-cloud environments encompassing the full multi-cloud spectrum including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Red Hat and Nutanix, said Tan.
“Morpheus allows IT departments to become service providers to line of businesses and developers,” he said. “It’s a platform to vend VMs or Kubernetes cluster and to have application catalogues and blueprints. That self-service allows IT departments to maintain governance, cost controls and monitoring.”
The big bang channel impact of Morpheus – which provides orchestration and lifecycle management for VMs and containers - is the ability for partners to become service providers for their customers, said Tan. Add on top of that OpsRamp monitoring and observability and partners have “essentially” a full-fledged MSP toolkit. “Literally we are rolling out an MSP kit and you can build an entire services business around that,” he said. “I would argue we are the most partner forward thinking company in the marketplace really taking our partners to the next level with their relationships with their customers.”
Tan praised the HPE team for moving quickly to provide a virtualization offering that meets the needs of both customers and partners. “We care deeply about our customers and partners and we respond to demand,” he said. “The company really mobilized around this.”