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.
