HPE Discover 2025 Morpheus Targets Virtualization Licensing

We just finished the HPE Discover 2025 keynote, and something was very apparent: HPE is hearing its customers’ concerns around VMware licensing costs. This is something we covered in pieces like VMware VCSP Customers Seeing 10x or More Cost Increases Under Broadcom, Broadcom VMware Ends Free VMware vSphere Hypervisor Closing an Era, and more. HPE Morpheus is the result of a 2024 acquisition and is HPE’s solution for companies looking to get off VMware (or other virtualization platforms in general.) The focus was big enough at Discover 2025 that it made the keynote.

HPE Discover 2025 Morpheus Targets Virtualization Licensing

During the keynote, Antonio Neri spent time discussing Morpheus and the tooling around it.

This has been a big push of HPE this year. We have heard the HPE team is mention that their customers feel squeezed by virtualization costs, and we know many STH readers have shared their stories about the same.

HPE has the Morpheus VM Essentials which is designed to start the journey off of VMware. There is then the Enterprise version and options for bringing this into HPE Private Cloud offerings.

HPE has a number of profiling tools and cost calculators to help customers calculate cost savings by moving workloads off to Morpheus. In the Enterprise editions, one can get down to comparing different hosting options for a given machine type across different public cloud and owned data centers.

The licensing side, that I did not fully appreciate before HPE Discover was the HPE Morpheus Essentials option. This has fewer features, like you can only manage local Morpheus KVM-based virtualiztion clusters and VMware clusters through vCenter integration. Think of it more like a replacement for managing a smaller number of servers that are running ESXi plus vCenter. The benefit, however, is that it is much lower cost.

We were told that list price is something like $600/ socket. So if you were to buy a 128 core or 192-core per socket platform, you are not limited by the core count before having to jump to buy additional core license packs or anything like that.

Again, this is just what we were told, but the full Enterprise version with all of the features is more like $2,500 per socket. Of course, that is what we heard, and may be off, but we heard both figures three times on the show floor.

Final Words

We know many folks are struggling with virtualization licensing costs. It seems like HPE sees the need. It was actually neat to see that HPE is aggressively trying to move customers off of VMware and the Morpheus booth was certainly busy today. For folks who are still looking for solutions, this might be one to look into especially if you are a HPE shop.