HPE Offers Year of Free Virtualization Software to Attract VMware Users

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is offering its "HPE Morpheus Software -- VM Essentials" for free for up to one year, a move intended to appeal to customers and partners affected by Broadcom's changes to VMware pricing. The announcement was made during HPE's Discover event in Las Vegas this week.

HPE's website positions VM Essentials as a "VMware alternative," featuring a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management. The platform allows users to manage both VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from a single console and supports migration. New VM Essentials customers are eligible for one free year of licenses, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to facilitate migration, and 0% interest on software purchases through HPE Financial Services.

The promotion comes amidst reports of increased VMware prices following Broadcom's acquisition, which led to the elimination of perpetual licenses and the bundling of products into more expensive packages. HPE's website suggests a price of $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials, a contrast to Broadcom's shift to a per-core licensing model for vSphere.

Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, noted that customers are experiencing "quite a bit of pain" from changes introduced by some virtualization companies, specifically Broadcom. Jenson claimed that VM Essentials could deliver up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware, while also helping to eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT.

From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been providing a free year of VM Essentials via rebate for customers purchasing an AMD server along with a one-year VM Essentials license. Unlike Broadcom's approach with VMware, VM Essentials is exclusively available through channel partners.

HPE further committed to providing 600 reseller partners who achieve the HPE partner program's Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by year-end with three years of free VM Essentials software licenses, though support costs would still apply. Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider Members IT Group (MITG), whose company was removed from VMware's reseller program, called the partner benefit "a step in the correct direction" but criticized the limit of 600 partners as "very shortsighted." He suggested that HPE should extend VM Essentials to all partners to accelerate adoption.

(Source: Slashdot)