This blog was authored by: Mike Gladders, Portfolio Lead | 23 April 2025

 

Welcome to Part 2 of our series about the exciting potential of HPE VM Essentials.  If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 where we explored what HPE VM Essentials is all about.  In this post we’ll dive deeper into the logical architecture, features at release time, and its roadmap to give you our view on just how good this solution from HPE really is. 

 

Let’s get stuck in.  We’re going to compare HPE VME against VMware vSphere.  No matter what you think about the parents VMware is still a good kid!  vSphere has been the dominant virtualisation solution of choice for well over a decade and whilst most conversations around alternatives are being driven by commercials, any vendors with real ambition for successful customer migrations needs to be strong on features and technical capabilities as well.   

 

One key thing to remember: HPE VME doesn’t force you to abandon VMware vSphere overnight. It allows you to manage existing vSphere clusters, meaning you can plan workload migrations based on specific feature and capability needs rather than rushing into a full switch.  The HPE VME Manager, using Morpheus software, handles the management of both hypervisor solutions from a single management plane. 

 

A good place to start is looking at the logical architecture of the HPE VM Essentials solution: 

 

The Foundation: HPE ProLiant Gen11 Servers 

At the heart of this setup, you’ve got HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers. These are the hardware backbone, officially validated to run HPE VM Essentials. Think of them as the high-performance, rock-solid base layer that everything else stacks on top of. 

 

The Operating System Layer: Ubuntu 22.04 

Rather than reinventing the wheel, HPE VM Essentials uses Ubuntu 22.04 as its base operating system. This makes a lot of sense—Ubuntu is well-supported, stable, and widely used in enterprise environments. You need it installed before deploying the hypervisor, so it’s essentially the launchpad for the whole VME setup.  22.04 is ana Long Term Support (LTS) release so you can expect a long support life as part of VME. 

 

The Workhorse: VM Essentials Agent 

Once you’ve got your OS in place, the VM Essentials agent comes into play. This small piece of software runs on each host, gathering system stats, handling logs, and executing commands from the VME Manager. Think of it as the bridge between your hosts and the management layer, making sure everything runs smoothly. 

 

The Virtualisation Stack: KVM, QEMU, and Libvirt 

At its core, HPE VM Essentials is built on tried-and-tested KVM technology. If you’re not familiar, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the powerhouse that turns Linux into a fully-fledged hypervisor. 

 

Supporting KVM, we have: 

  • QEMU – The emulator and “virtualiser” that allows you to run both Windows and Linux virtual machines. 
  • Libvirt – A hypervisor-independent API that helps manage virtualisation across different platforms. 

 

These three work together to handle the actual creation and operation of virtual machines (VMs), ensuring everything runs as expected. 

 

The Networking Backbone: Open vSwitch (OvS) 

Networking in a virtualised environment is always a key concern. HPE VM Essentials relies on Open vSwitch (OvS) for its software-defined networking layer. OvS provides powerful virtual networking capabilities, ensuring your VMs can communicate efficiently with each other and the outside world. 

 

Keeping Things Highly Available: Pacemaker Cluster Service (PCS) 

Nobody wants downtime, right? That’s where Pacemaker Cluster Service (PCS) comes in. This clustering technology enables high availability, ensuring workloads can fail over to another host if needed. It also helps with clustered filesystem management, keeping everything in sync across multiple hosts. 

 

The Brains of the Operation: HPE VM Essentials Manager 

Sitting at the top of this whole architecture is the HPE VM Essentials Manager. This is the central control hub where all the magic happens. It handles: 

 

  • KVM clustering 
  • Identity management 
  • VM provisioning 
  • Monitoring and logging 
  • Web-based management via an HTML5 UI 

 

The HPE VME Manager itself runs as a VM within the stack. That’s a neat way to keep things lightweight while ensuring a simple deployment model. 

 

 

 

So that’s the logical architecture, but a brand new hypervisor solution can’t be feature rich from day 1 can it?  Well, it is important to note that whilst this is the first release of this solution in this form, KVM itself has been around for a long time now and indeed the KVM and Morpheus combination was announced by Morpheus before the acquisition by HPE.  So, this isn’t a true day 1 release, and we should expect it to bring some strong feature parity with VMware from the beginning.   

 

Let’s dive straight into the big ones then: 

 

  • Live Migration 
  • High Availability 
  • Live Storage Migration 
  • Workload Balancing (DRS) 

 

All included in HPE VME!  We feel that these are the core features any hypervisor solutions need to provide for the average customer to consider it as an option.  Live Migration, High Availability and Live Storage Migration are all features of vSphere Standard, but Workload Balancing, or DRS, is a feature you would need to upgrade to vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing to utilise on VMware clusters. 

 

What other features do we have on day one?: 

 

VMware VM Conversion: Making the Transition Easier:  One of the standout features of HPE VM Essentials is its built-in VMware-to-VME conversion tool. This means that migrating workloads doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing decision. You can selectively move workloads over time, ensuring a smooth transition while keeping existing VMware clusters under the same management plane. 

 

Day 2 Automation & Secure Secrets Management:  HPE VM Essentials isn’t just about deploying VMs; it’s about managing them efficiently. The Day 2 automation feature allows administrators to execute Bash and PowerShell scripts on running VMs. Need to automate security patching, software deployment, or configuration changes? VME has you covered. Plus, with Cypher secrets management, you can securely store and retrieve credentials for automation tasks. 

 

Smarter Networking: IPAM, DNS, & VLANs:  Networking isn’t just about making things talk—it’s about doing it efficiently. HPE VME integrates with Infoblox, phpIPAM, BlueCat, and SolarWinds for automated IP address management and DNS record creation during provisioning. No more manual IP reservations or forgetting to update DNS—VME takes care of it. 

 

On the physical side, best practices recommend a minimum of 4 VLANs, including separate VLANs for VM compute, host management, and multi-pathing storage traffic (MPIO) over Aruba 8325 switches. For high availability, using LACP bonding and redundant network paths is strongly advised. 

 

Enterprise Storage: GFSv2 & Beyond:  While HPE VME supports iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel (soon), HPE’s recommended approach is to configure Alletra MP storage as a Global File System 2 (GFSv2) over iSCSI. This ensures high availability, efficient failover, and better multi-host consistency. 

 

It’s not all good news from day one though.  There are still a few core features, which are needed to win over those enterprise customers, that aren’t available at release time.  They are all on the roadmap for 2025 though so let’s take a quick look at what is coming. 

 

Affinity and Anti-Affinity:  Affinity rules are already available, allowing workloads to stick together. But if you need Anti-Affinity rules (keeping certain workloads apart), you’ll have to wait a bit—it’s on the roadmap. 

 

Storage Support: What’s In & What’s Coming:  At release the Alletra MP, Primera, Alletra 5K, 6K, 9K, 3PARs and Nimble are supported, on iSCSI.  As you would expect HPE have focused their development time on the HPE array family for the initial release.  However, support for Fibre Channel was demonstrated at HPE Tech Jam sessions we attended and is not far from making it to the production release.  HPE also say that support for 3rd party arrays is also coming.  At the end of the day this is just a KVM hypervisor running on Ubuntu Linux so almost any type of storage is going to be compatible, we just need to wait for HPE to officially support it in production deployments of VME.  Local and NFS storage are supported too. 

 

3rd Party Backup and DR:  This is the big one for us.  As a company that is responsible for a lot of critical data and applications for our customers we know, and we shout about how important backup and restore capability is.  This is where for us HPE VME falls just short of being production ready for critical and production workloads today, because while there is a backup mechanism fully integrated into the solution itself (which will work perfectly well), having the peace of mind of a 3rd party product protecting the data outside of the primary solution is invaluable.  And the story is the same for DR to an external site as well.  To be clear, 3rd party backups through agents in the Operating Systems is supported from Day 1.  However, agentless hypervisor integrated backups by 3rd parties is not here yet. 

 

Rest assured HPE is aware of the need for this though and the current timelines for implementation are Q2 2025.  Through our partnership with Veeam we are in discussions with them on this subject as well and we know it is an important feature that Veeam is developing.  Veeam V12.3 already has support for data protection for KVM workloads so official support of VME shouldn’t take long.  Commvault are also in advanced development on integrations with VME, and Zerto being part of the HPE family also has a huge focus on developing support for VME.  Cohesity is also known to be working on integration.  So VME is marked down slightly here but HPE has clear plans and ambition to plug this shortfall this year. 

 

 

Those are all of the big hitters, and below are a few more of the 2025 Q3 roadmap items: 

 

Logs & Metrics 

  • Available Now: Basic native logging and metrics collection. 
  • Coming Soon: Integration with OpsRamp for advanced monitoring and analytics. 

 

GPU Support 

  • Available Now: Not yet available. 
  • Coming Soon: Planned support via VME & Morpheus for GPU passthrough and AI/ML workloads. 

 

Install Experience 

  • Available Now: Ubuntu-based installation required. 
  • Coming Soon: A streamlined installation process to simplify deployment. 

 

Storage Integrations 

  • Available Now: Basic support for vVols and vSAN. 
  • Coming Soon: Alletra plugin support and additional storage integrations. 

 

OVA/OVF Support 

  • Available Now: Not yet available. 
  • Coming Soon: Planned support for OVA/OVF, improving workload portability. 

 

 

Final Verdict: Is HPE VME Ready? 

HPE VM Essentials is off to a strong start, offering live migration, high availability, workload balancing, and native data protection from day one. Its VMware VM conversion tools, unified multi-hypervisor management, and networking integrations make it a compelling choice for those exploring alternatives. The foundation is solid, and with IPAM, DNS automation, and storage options like iSCSI and NFS, it covers many key enterprise requirements. 

 

With Fibre Channel support, third-party backup integration, and GPU passthrough all on the roadmap for 2025, HPE is rapidly closing the final gaps. Zerto, Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity are already working on integrations, and the pace of development is accelerating. For test/dev, edge, and non-critical workloads, it’s ready today. For production, start making it part of your plans—by the time you’ve completed your test/dev Proof of Concept and business cases, it will be ready to go! 

 

We’re sold already, but is it expensive? 

The next blog post is going to be dedicated entirely to the socket-based licensing and commercial models so you’ll have to hold tight and wait for that one to understand all of the details, but…spoiler alert… it’s a lot cheaper than VMware VCF! 😊 

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