HPE announces VM Essentials – the VMWare competitor that isn’t

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled Virtual Machine Essentials (VME) this week at its annual European conference, HPE Discover Barcelona 2024.

The company’s virtual machine plans were teased in June at its flagship conference but are now finally starting to be made available to customers outside of just its private cloud offering.

VME is available both as an embedded software in Private Cloud and as a standalone piece of software that can be used both on HPE ProLiant and Alletra servers and on third-party hardware.

It’s built on the back technology created by Morpheus, which the company made in August 2024, and as CEO Antonio Neri said during his keynote: “[It] provides a unified VM management experience, which means you can manage existing VMware workloads or the new HP VM Essentials hypervisor with a simplified experience across both stacks.”

HPE executives walked a tight line between mentioning the controversial pricing changes that have happened with VMware software since its acquisition by Broadcom, without pitching VME as a direct competitor.

Hang Tan, COO for hybrid cloud at HPE, told a press conference: “This notion that you can get, you can streamline IT operations and achieve efficiencies by embracing a single ecosystem … is obsolete now. That no longer flies. CIOs are finally rethinking their IT strategies and because embracing a single ecosystem, the cost associated with that is no longer sustainable.”

“They're looking for flexibility and this is where virtualization comes in. This is where HPE, VM essentials, our virtualization software comes in,” he continued. “What's great about it is it's very self-contained, so customers can really take advantage of this capability, lower their virtualization costs and not have to pay for services that they don't need.”

This was the core argument from all members of the HPE leadership team who spoke to ITPro. VME doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that VMware’s products do, but that’s because not everyone needs them all the time.

As Ulrich Seibold, VP global of HPE GreenLake partner and service provider sales, told the channel press in attendance: “VM Essentials we do not position as a competitive tool or software to Broadcom. In all of our products, Broadcom services are included, and we have a strong partnership with them. But there might be areas or environments where partners or customers have a budget constraint or they do not want to get the full speed – for them, a virtual machine is good enough.”

Nevertheless, the undertone of the message was clear: If VMware’s new pricing strategy – which Neri said in his keynote had caused some customers’ costs to increase 300%-500% – was too expensive, here is an alternative.