HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, Zerto and Veeam: Why the Ecosystem Changes the Conversation

If you’ve worked in infrastructure for any length of time, you’ll know this much is true: finding an alternative hypervisor has never really been the hard part. 

Running a virtual machine somewhere else? Fine. The industry can do that. There are plenty of options. 

The harder part has always been everything wrapped around it: backup, disaster recovery, application consistency, recovery testing, migration tooling, and the operational confidence to let important workloads run there without creating new risk. That has been the real gap between “interesting alternative” and “production-ready platform” for a long time.  

That is why this moment is worth paying attention to. 

Because with HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, Zerto and Veeam now aligning properly around the same platform, we are no longer just talking about a lower-cost hypervisor or a side project for test and dev. We are talking about a much more complete private cloud proposition for organisations that are comfortable managing their own environments and want a credible, enterprise-supported route beyond traditional VMware dependency.  

It is worth saying that plainly. 

VMware is still a technically strong platform, and in an earlier Telefónica Tech article on VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0, I made the point that VMware remains extremely capable as a private cloud platform, particularly when customers want the full stack rather than just core virtualisation. That still holds.  

Equally, in our article on Telefónica Tech Hosted Cloud, we made the case that for customers who still need VMware stability delivered as a fully managed service, there is a strong answer available already. That remains true as well. If the requirement is to keep VMware, reduce operational burden, and consume it as a managed platform rather than keep owning the complexity internally, that is a valid path.

But that is not the exact question this blog is addressing. 

This blog is about organisations that do want to consider the next step in their own private cloud strategy, and who until recently would have looked at HPE Morpheus VM Essentials and said, “this is promising, but what about backup and DR?” That was the sticking point.  

We do not need to go back through every layer of the product architecture again, because I covered that in our earlier deep dive into HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, including the Ubuntu 22.04 base, the KVM, QEMU and libvirt stack, Open vSwitch, clustering, high availability and the Morpheus-powered management plane. If you want the under-the-bonnet detail, that blog is still the best place to start.

The short version is that HPE Morpheus VM Essentials was already attractive because it combined a KVM-based hypervisor with a single management plane that can manage both HPE VME and VMware vSphere environments. That coexistence model has been one of its biggest strengths from the start, because it lets customers plan migration based on real workload requirements rather than forcing a big bang switch.

It also brought back socket-based licensing, which was one of the clearest commercial differentiators after Broadcom’s shift to a different VMware licensing model. I have already gone into that in detail in my earlier pricing blog, so I won’t repeat the full argument here, but the core point still matters: for many customers, the attraction of HPE VME was never just technical. It was about regaining some predictability and flexibility in how virtualisation is licensed and consumed.  

So, the base platform story was already there. 

What was still maturing was the resilience ecosystem around it. 

This is the bit that matters most. 

Most infrastructure teams are not held back by uncertainty over whether another hypervisor can host a workload. They are held back by uncertainty over whether they can protect, recover, test, and operate that workload to the same standard they are used to elsewhere. That is a very different threshold.

It is one thing to say a platform has high availability and live migration. It is another to say it can support point-in-time recovery, multi-VM application protection, agentless enterprise backup, application-aware restore, and recovery workflows that fit the way real operations teams work.

That is why the arrival of Zerto and Veeam around HPE Morpheus VM Essentials changes the tone of the conversation so noticeably.  

Let’s start with Zerto, because this is the part that takes the story beyond traditional backup and restore, and into disaster resilience.

The recently available Zerto support for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials environments brings continuous data protection, journal-based recovery, Virtual Protection Groups, checkpoint-based recovery, site pairing, and HVM-to-HVM disaster recovery to the platform. It means HPE VME can now support the sort of DR model enterprise customers have been expecting.

From a technical perspective, the Zerto model is a huge strength. Virtual machines are protected in VPGs, writes are replicated to the remote site, journals are maintained per protected VM, and checkpoints are written every few seconds. The practical effect of that is it becomes possible to recover to a much more granular point in time, which is exactly why Zerto has always stood out in disaster recovery and cyber recovery conversations.

That matters because the modern recovery challenge is often not “do I have a copy?” but “do I have the right copy?” If a workload has been corrupted, encrypted or otherwise compromised, the ability to roll back to a checkpoint just before the event is far more valuable than recovering the latest backup and checking whether it clean. With Zerto on HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, that style of recovery becomes part of the story.

There are some other practical advantages too. Zerto supports boot order, failover testing, test networks, failover networks, and coordinated protection across multiple VMs. For any customer running multi-tier applications, that is important, because recovery needs to reflect the application as a service, not just the individual VMs that happen to make it up.  

The other major development is Veeam, and this is just as important for a slightly different reason.

On 9 March 2026, Veeam Data Platform announced the general availability of agentless, host-level, image-based backup support for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software. That is the point where the data protection conversation moved from roadmap to reality.

And it is worth being specific about what that means.

This is not simply guest-based protection or a workaround through agents inside every VM. The Veeam Plug-in for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials integrates directly with the HVM hypervisor and the HPE Morpheus VM Essentials control plane to deliver agentless, image-level, host-based backup. That matters because it gives customers the sort of backup model they are already familiar with.

The technical feature set is strong too. Changed Block Tracking is available for faster incremental backups and reduced source read I/O. Full VM restore into HVM is supported. Cross-hypervisor recovery is supported. There is application-aware processing with VSS, and file-level and application item recovery for workloads such as Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory and Oracle.

There is also a broader operational benefit here. Many customers considering non-VMware platforms were not really worried about whether the hypervisor worked. They were worried about whether backup and restore would feel like a backward step. Veeam’s GA support for HPE Morpheus VM Essentials removes that concern. It gives customers a familiar protection framework and makes the platform far more mature operationally. 

In a better position, mainly because the choices are becoming clearer. 

If a customer wants stable VMware consumed as a fully managed service, and does not want to own the complexity of running or rethinking that stack themselves, then Telefónica Tech Hosted Cloud is still a strong answer to that question.

If a customer is instead comfortable managing their own private cloud, wants more flexibility in how they evolve the estate, and has been waiting for a supported platform beyond VMware to look mature enough in technical and operational terms, then HPE Morpheus VM Essentials looks much stronger now that Zerto and Veeam are in place. That is the key distinction. The two paths solve related problems, but they are not aimed at exactly the same operating model.  

When I wrote the earlier deep dive into HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, one of the clearest caveats was that while the product foundations were strong, the wider ecosystem around enterprise backup and disaster recovery still needed to catch up. That was the honest assessment then.

The picture now is so much better.

With Zerto bringing a proper disaster recovery story to HPE Morpheus VM Essentials, and Veeam now generally available for agentless, host-level, image-based backup, HPE VME feels less like an emerging alternative and more like a now-mature platform option for the right organisations and the right workloads.  

If you are ready to explore a lower-cost, enterprise-ready alternative for a self-managed private cloud environment, now is a good time to take a serious look at HPE Morpheus VM Essentials. With Zerto and Veeam now strengthening the disaster recovery and backup story around the platform, it has become a much more credible option for organisations that want to move on from VMware at their own pace, without compromising on resilience. 

And if your priority is still VMware stability delivered as a fully managed service, Telefónica Tech Hosted Cloud remains a strong answer there too. 

Either way, the next step is simple: talk to Telefónica Tech, book an assessment, or start a 30-day HPE Morpheus VM Essentials trialto see what fits your estate best.