In an era of digital transformation, speed and agility of application modernization is key to success.

It can take weeks for IT to deliver new application stacks because of manual hand-offs across a fragmented set of ‘software-definable’ technologies on premises. This inefficiency has led internal IT consumers often bypassing IT in favor of public cloud application services which both raises cloud costs and opens security holes.

Born to provide simple and consistent provisioning of VMs, Containers, and Applications into any private or public cloud, HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software enables IT to become a true internal service provider for the business. It brings the cloud experience on-premises, extends governance to the public clouds, and bridges the gaps between technology, people, and process.

HPE Morpheus Software is a versatile platform available in three editions: Enterprise, Advanced, and VM Essentials.

The VM Essentials edition is tailored for hypervisor management, providing a KVM-based HVM hypervisor with enterprise-grade features such as high availability, live migration, distributed workload placement, data protection, security hardening, and external storage support. It also offers seamless management of existing VMware clusters, enabling unified VM provisioning across both HVM and VMware ESXi platforms. This allows organizations to provision workloads flexibly and on demand, with the additional capability to convert VMware images to Morpheus-managed environments, offering operational flexibility with minimal vendor lock-in.

The Advanced edition extends hypervisor management with the automation, orchestration, and platform capabilities of the Enterprise edition, while remaining scoped to on-premises virtualization. It manages the same HVM and VMware vSphere environments as VM Essentials, and adds configuration management tooling, Kubernetes cluster provisioning, software defined networking, workload monitoring, and reporting. Teams that want to automate an existing virtualization estate without adopting public cloud or multi-tenancy can do so without moving to the Enterprise edition.

The Enterprise edition is engineered for hybrid cloud management, enabling enterprise teams to efficiently meet their specific needs. IT and platform teams can rapidly integrate tools and dependencies without scripting, standardize cloud operations, simplify server provisioning, and automate lifecycle tasks. Infrastructure and security teams benefit from connecting third-party identity providers, managing roles and policies, enforcing RBAC, and handling secrets management. Development, data analytics, and other IT users gain on-demand provisioning of application services and stacks across multiple runtimes and clouds via GUI, ITSM plugins, IaC providers, APIs, CLI, and CI/CD pipelines. Managed Service Providers can leverage Morpheus as a white-labeled, multi-tenant portal to deliver services and meter usage for customer billing. Building on the capabilities of VM Essentials and Advanced, Enterprise adds multi-tenancy with software defined networking, enabling IT and platform teams to provide tenant isolation that includes network services

Validated Hardware and Software

The list of validated compute and storage hardware for the HVM hypervisor can be found in the compatibility matrix, along with validated operating systems and ISV software.

Built-in KVM and Kubernetes runtime options

HVM hypervisor

Applies to: all editions.

• − Deploy and manage HPE's HVM hypervisor clusters. Based on KVM, this built-in runtime includes external storage support, VM live migration, storage live migration, data protection, and other features to host virtualized workloads.
• − Quickly view status and health of HVM clusters across your environment to simplify operations, view cluster metrics, and provide lifecycle management of HPE native HVM cluster types.

HPE Morpheus Kubernetes Service

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

• − Use the built-in CNCF certified Kubernetes Service (HKS) to deploy Kubernetes on HVM and VMware vSphere, including highly available control plane configurations. Includes open-source components such as Prometheus, Grafana, Calico, and others to quickly get started with containers.
• − View status and health of Kubernetes clusters, view cluster metrics and logs, and provide lifecycle management of HPE native HKS cluster types.

Third-party and cloud-managed Kubernetes

Applies to: enterprise.

• − Deploy HKS onto any attached public cloud in addition to on-premises virtualization.
• − Create custom Kubernetes cluster layouts to deploy distributions such as Rancher's K3s, Red Hat OpenShift, or vanilla upstream Kubernetes.
• − Enable provisioning of cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters like AWS EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE, and attach existing external clusters.
• − Manage OpenShift Virtualization alongside other runtimes.

Docker hosts

Applies to: all editions.

• − Provision and manage Docker hosts to run containerized workloads without a full Kubernetes cluster.

Governance guardrails so users and teams have a paved road

Identity, access, and audit

Applies to: all editions.

• − Connect to corporate identity providers and use SSO. Map groups and users into fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) guardrails.
• − Improve your overall security posture by ensuring consistent golden template use, embedding security agents at provision time, locking down access, rotating credentials, managing secrets, and auditing all activity.

Tailored user experience

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

• − Present a tailored interface to each type of user through personas, including standard, virtualization, and service catalog personas, so that operators see the controls relevant to their role.

Policy and tenant governance

Applies to: enterprise.

• − Govern tenants, teams, and users with dozens of policies for infrastructure and lifecycle management, applied automatically at provision time and through the workload lifecycle.

Multi-tenancy and service provider delivery

Applies to: enterprise.

• − Utilize multi-tenancy to fully segregate which teams and users have access to different cloud environments. Share hypervisors and clouds across multiple tenants or let tenants have their own individual cloud accounts.
• − Deliver services as a white-labeled, multi-tenant portal and meter usage for customer billing.

Cost visibility and FinOps

Resource usage visibility

Applies to: all editions.

• − Automatically discover and inventory existing instances and objects across managed environments, and view resource usage across the estate.

Cloud cost management and optimization

Applies to: enterprise.

• − Run analytics to find problems and implement guidance recommendations for cloud cost saving.
• − Go beyond reporting to fix cost issues at their source. Set budget guardrails and power schedules, limit clouds and plans by role, plus provide cloud cost comparisons at provision time for end-user empowerment.
• − Centralize cost and usage data across on-premises and public cloud. Track costs and usage for every tenant, user, group, tag, app, cloud, and more for private infrastructure and public cloud including public cloud invoice synchronization.

Software Defined Networking

Network deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

With the SDN plugin, HPE Morpheus customers can obtain simplified network operations, flexibility, and scalability of network deployment.

• − Increased control with greater speed and flexibility with SDN. The SDN controller manages the network and enables rapid changes to be made based on network and workload demands, improving overall performance of the traffic flows.
• − SDN provides customizable network infrastructure that allows administrators the ability to configure network services and allocate virtual resources in real time through the SDN Controller. This allows network administrators to optimize the flow of data through the network and prioritize applications that require more availability.
• − Create VxLAN backed shared private networks through Open vSwitch, deploy overlay networks and routing, distribute traffic with managed load balancing, and configure NAT and VPN gateway services for ingress and egress.
• − Monitor and troubleshoot network operations through day 2 observability tooling.

Network security and micro-segmentation in Software Defined Networking

Applies to: enterprise.

• − SDN simplifies network micro-segmentation by creating network zones that isolate workloads and secure them individually. With software-defined controls, administrators can define policies that limit traffic between segments based on a zero-trust security model. Security groups provide object-based protection around each workload.

Monitoring, reporting, and operational scale

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

• − Monitor workload health and collect logs across managed environments to detect problems before users report them.
• − Report on capacity, utilization, and activity across the managed estate.
• − Distribute automation execution across multiple workers to scale orchestration throughput and reach isolated network segments.

AI

Model Context Protocol

Applies to: all editions.

• − Expose the platform to AI tooling through the Model Context Protocol so that external assistants can query and act on the managed estate.

AI workflows

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

• − Build automation that calls your own language model through bring-your-own-model AI tasks.

AI chat and proactive agent

Applies to: enterprise.

• − Interact with the platform conversationally through AI chat, and let the proactive agent surface recommendations without being asked.

Integrations

Infrastructure and data protection integrations

Applies to: all editions.

• − IP Address Management (IPAM): InfoBlox, BlueCat, SolarWinds, phpIPAM, and EfficientIP, to automate the reservation and assignment of IP addresses. Native IP pools are also available.
• − Domain Name System (DNS): PowerDNS, Microsoft DNS, BlueCat, InfoBlox, and EfficientIP, to automate the creation of DNS A and PTR records.
• − Data protection: Commvault, Rubrik, and Veeam, to create backup jobs during virtual machine creation and restore backups through the web interface. Native snapshot-based data protection is also available.
• − Storage: HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 direct volume mapping for granular performance configuration and array-based snapshotting, alongside NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.
• − Secrets management: securely store and retrieve credentials and other sensitive information used in automation tasks.

Automation and delivery integrations

Applies to: advanced and enterprise.

• − Configuration management: Ansible, Chef, and Puppet.
• − Load balancers: integrate third-party load balancers into workload provisioning.
• − Source control: connect source control systems to manage automation content as code.

Service management and cloud integrations

Applies to: enterprise.

• − IT Service Management: ServiceNow® and other ITSM tools.
• − Public clouds: AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and more.
• − Infrastructure as code: Terraform providers and CI/CD pipeline integration.
• − Guidance: analytics-driven recommendations across connected clouds.

Enterprise virtualization

Applies to: all editions.

• − VM Live Migration: Migrate running virtual machines from one physical host to another within an HVM cluster without downtime to improve host utilization or to perform host maintenance.
• − VM High Availability: Enable workload resiliency with virtual machine high availability to quickly restart virtual machines on another physical host in the event of a host failure.
• − Distributed Workload Placement: Dynamically schedule the placement of virtual machines within an HVM cluster based on intelligent placement logic that determines the optimal host for the virtual machine.
• − VM Live Storage Migration: Migrate a running virtual machine's storage disks from one datastore to another without downtime.
• − External Storage Support: Integrate with existing external storage (NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel) to take advantage of existing infrastructure investments.
• − VMware vSphere Integration: Discover existing virtual machines, provision new virtual machines, and manage provisioned or discovered machines in a vSphere deployment.

Virtual machine management

Applies to: all editions.

• − Power Operations: Start, stop, and restart VMware and HVM virtual machines.
• − Snapshot Management: Create, revert, and delete virtual machine snapshots for VMware and HVM virtual machines.
• − Virtual Hardware Management: Add and remove virtual hardware such as hard disks, network interfaces, CPU and memory from a managed virtual machine.
• − Integrated Backup Management: Create, restore, and delete virtual machine backups for VMware and HVM virtual machines.
• −HTML5 Console: Access the console of managed virtual machines via the web interface with support for Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Secure Shell (SSH), and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
• −Day 2 Task Automation: Execute automation scripts (Bash and PowerShell) against managed virtual machines to perform day 2 operational tasks such as freeing up disk space or updating system packages.
• −Tag Management: Create and manage virtual machine tags for VMware and HVM virtual machines.

For a complete set of up-to-date technical information and integration guides please visit the:

HPE Morpheus Enterprise documentation site.

Edition comparison

For the complete feature-level comparison, see the HPE Morpheus documentation site.