HPE VM Essentials (VME) — KVM Virtualization
Hands-on HPE VM Essentials — KVM-on-Ubuntu virtualization with HPE's management layer, and the Zerto and Morpheus portfolio around it.
What a customer gets out of it
- Give customers hands-on time with HPE's new KVM-based virtualization offering rather than a slide deck
- Show VM workloads hosted, built and maintained in a more cloud-like operating model
- Explain where Zerto and Morpheus fit — data protection and multicloud orchestration around the VM platform
- Support a costed comparison against VMware VCF, Nutanix and OpenShift on identical lab hardware
Why it matters
Broadcom's repackaging of VMware has sent a large number of organisations looking for an alternative VM platform, and most of the options ask them to accept a worse operating model in exchange for a better price. HPE VM Essentials is HPE's answer: KVM on Ubuntu as the hypervisor, with HPE's own management layer above it, positioned as an enterprise platform rather than a bare hypervisor. What makes it a portfolio conversation rather than a point product is what HPE has assembled around it — Zerto for continuous data protection and recovery, Morpheus for multicloud orchestration and self-service. For a customer weighing a renewal, the question is whether the combination covers what they actually use today, and that is a question best answered by driving it rather than reading a datasheet.
Lab overview
No walkthrough is recorded for this demo yet, so this is a 21 sec tour of the lab and how to use it.
Trouble playing? Download the file.
Overview
This environment builds HPE VM Essentials (VME) across the lab's demo hypervisors — HPE's KVM-based virtualization platform, with its own management layer — so customers, SMEs and engineers can drive it on real hardware without touching a production estate.
Bookable as a guided demo, a hands-on POC, or a classroom for a group.
What HPE VM Essentials is
VME is a comparatively new offering, and it is deliberately built on open foundations: the hypervisor is KVM running on Ubuntu, rather than a proprietary kernel. On top of that sits HPE VM Essentials Manager, which is where the platform stops being "KVM with extra steps" and becomes something an enterprise operations team can run — provisioning, lifecycle, and fleet management of VM workloads.
The intent is to let customers host, build and maintain VM workloads in a more cloud-like architecture: infrastructure consumed through a management plane and an API rather than assembled host by host, with the operational model closer to how the same team already works in a public cloud.
The portfolio around it
VME on its own is a virtualization platform. What makes it an enterprise conversation is what HPE has assembled around it:
- Zerto — continuous data protection, disaster recovery and ransomware recovery. Journal-based rather than snapshot-based, which is what allows recovery to a point seconds before an incident rather than to last night's backup.
- Morpheus — hybrid and multicloud orchestration: self-service provisioning, policy and governance, and automation spanning on-premises and public cloud from one place.
Together the three are positioned as a comprehensive VM and multicloud platform — the VM estate, its protection, and the orchestration layer that reaches beyond it.
Why customers are looking
Most organisations evaluating VME arrive from the same place: a virtualization renewal that now costs materially more than it used to, and a decision they had not expected to revisit. The useful question is not whether an alternative is cheaper — it usually is — but whether it covers what the estate actually depends on. Backup and DR integration, orchestration, self-service, and the operational habits of the team all matter more than the hypervisor itself.
That is what this environment is for: driving it against those requirements rather than reading a comparison table.
What you'll learn
- Building and operating VM workloads on VME's KVM-on-Ubuntu foundation
- What HPE's management layer adds over plain KVM, and where the gaps still are
- Where Zerto fits for protection and recovery, and how journal-based recovery differs from snapshots
- What Morpheus adds once more than one cloud is in play
- How VME compares against VMware VCF, Nutanix and OpenShift — all of which run on identical lab hardware, so the comparison is like-for-like