---
# source: src/content/solutions/en/hpe/hpe-morpheus/vm-essentials.md
# route:  /en/solutions/hpe/hpe-morpheus/vm-essentials/
title: Morpheus VM Essentials
tags: [virtualization, migration, cloud]
vendors: [hpe, morpheus]
summary: HPE's own hypervisor with a control plane that runs it beside vSphere. Licensed per socket, which is the whole argument.
photoNeed: The Morpheus self-service catalogue on screen, with someone provisioning from it
stub: false
draft: false
kind: product
addon: false
sourceNote: HPE, HPE Morpheus Software Virtualization product page and its feature comparison table, read 2026-08-30. HPE dates that table “as of Oct 2025”.
vendorName: HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software
status: current
practice: >
  Draft, not yet reviewed. We treat this as a licence question first and a technology question second. Whether HVM runs your workload is answerable in a fortnight; whether the move is worth doing depends on socket count, on the vSphere renewal date, and on how many of your operational habits are actually vCenter habits.
practiceReview: true
---

## What it is

VM Essentials is HPE's own virtualization platform: the HVM hypervisor, plus a management
layer that runs HVM clusters and VMware vSphere clusters side by side in the same console.
Container workloads go through HKS from the same place.

## Why it exists

It is aimed at the estate looking for a way out of a per-core licence. HPE prices it **per
socket**, on one, three or five year terms, and puts a VMware ESXi to HVM migration feature
in the product rather than in a services engagement.

HPE's own headline number is a cost reduction of up to 90 percent. That is HPE's claim and
not ours; what it depends on is your core-to-socket ratio, and that is arithmetic you can do
before anyone comes to visit.

## The part people miss

The two hypervisors run **beside** each other. You are not choosing a migration date, you
are choosing a rate. Clusters move when their hardware refresh or their application owner
says so, and the console does not care which side a VM is on in the meantime.

That is a different proposition from a hypervisor swap, and it is the reason this is worth
looking at even where a full move is out of the question.

## Where it stops

VM Essentials is the virtualization tier. Ordering, governance, cost control and the
public clouds are the tier above it, HPE Morpheus Software, and that is an upgrade rather
than a reinstall.

One thing to check early: micro-segmentation here is an add-on and it expects HPE Aruba
Networking CX 10000 switches. If your segmentation story today is a distributed firewall in
software, that is not a like-for-like replacement and it belongs in the design, not in the
surprise column.