Introduction
The aftermath of Broadcom’s VMware acquisition resulted in not only existing VMware customers considering a different hypervisor but also reshaped competitive dynamics of the entire virtualization ecosystem.
In separate blog articles, we have covered the most popular alternative options, such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Proxmox VE. Today, we want to explore more alternatives in the market.
HPE’s acquisition of Morpheus Data allowed HPE to integrate management and orchestration capabilities with KVM hypervisor, ultimately resulting in the HPE VM Essentials product.
What is HPE VM Essentials?
So, what is HPE VM Essentials? HPE VM Essentials is a virtualization software solution allowing users to provision and manage virtual machines (VMs) on KVM-based HPE VME hypervisor (included in the bundle) and well-known VMware vSphere. This allows organizations to manage both platforms, whether they are separate clusters or during the transition from vSphere to VME.
HPE VM Essentials also provides built-in, free migration tools for those who want to move from the VMware ecosystem to HPE VME. A convenient User Interface allows IT personnel to simplify daily routine tasks and easily provision VMs on both VMware vSphere and HPE VME hypervisor.
While it allows you to manage both VMware vSphere and HPE VME, it is evident that the main intention behind it is to transition you to HPE VME hypervisor and give you a glimpse into Morpheus Data hybrid cloud solutions.
What is HPE VME Hypervisor?
HPE VME is based on a KVM hypervisor with additional orchestration and management capabilities provided by HPE. As mentioned in the intro, HPE’s acquisition of Morpheus Data allowed HPE to build a convenient UI to orchestrate and create virtual machines.
Since VME is based on KVM, you can expect pretty much all the features that are available in most of the KVM-based offerings, such as clustering, high availability, live migration, PCI/GPU pass-through, Ceph integration, support for external SAN/NAS/SDS storage via FCP and iSCSI and many more.
Key HPE VM Essentials Features
Let’s talk about the key features of HPE VM Essentials:
- Unified Management Console – allows you to monitor and manage both VMware and HPE VME hypervisors and get familiar with Morpheus Data in general.
- Virtualization – as mentioned above, HPE VM Essentials allows you to provision and manage virtual machines from KVM-based VME and existing vSphere clusters.
- Integration & Automation – HPE VM Essentials does have integration with some storage SANs, also supports generic iSCSI/FCP/NFS-based storage for storage provisioning, and has Ceph integrated for HCI scenarios. Additionally, VME allows you to configure automation and orchestration for your VMs.
- Data protection – HPE VME comes with an embedded data protection engine that works on both VME and vSphere.
HPE VM Essentials Licensing
The licensing for VM Essentials is very similar to Proxmox licensing. Nowadays, instead of the industry standard per-core license, VM Essentials is licensed per socket, and it is subscription-based, with options for 1/3/5 years of support. If you plan to manage both vSphere and newly deployed VME, you’ll need to cover all sockets managed by VM Essentials. VM Essentials also has a 60-day free trial for those who want to test the solution before making any decision.
Deployment Options
Officially, HPE VME only supports HPE ProLiant platforms starting from Gen10+. You can check the HPE compatibility matrix available here. For evaluation purposes, you can install nested on your existing hypervisor. However, remember that nested virtualization can give you a high-scope understanding of how the solution will work but will be limited in terms of performance and stability compared to hardware-based experience.
Additionally, HPE VME tightly integrates with HPE Private Cloud, and you can manage bare metal and cloud deployments using Morpheus data.
Getting Started with HPE VM Essentials
To start with HPE VM Essentials, you’ll need to install Ubuntu Server 22.04 or 24.04 first. You can get ISO images from the Ubuntu Download Center. HPE is planning to release streamlined ISO in the future. Static IP addresses are required, and it is recommended to update Ubuntu to the latest updates and security patches.
You can start with at least 1 node for the non-HCI scenario or at least 3 nodes for the HCI scenario (due to the fact that Ceph is used for HCI storage).
You also need an official HPE VME ISO that can be downloaded from the HPE web portal. The ISO contains a QCOW2 image for HPE VM Essentials software and a .deb package that will install all needed packages on your clean Ubuntu installation. You need to upload .deb package to every host you want to use as HPE VME, while QCOW2 image can be uploaded only to one of them. QCOW2 image is delivered in the gz archive, so you can uncompress it by using the following command as an example:
sudo gzip –d hpe-vme-8.0.5-1.qcow2.gz
Unlike most KVM-based solutions, HPE VME uses GFS2 for shared storage (instead of classic LVM-over-Protocol). If you want to utilize generic iSCSI/FCP storage, make sure you have the HWE kernel enabled on Ubuntu.
Once everything is set, you can go ahead and install .deb package on each node you are planning to turn into HPE VM Essentials.
sudo apt install -f ./hpe-vm_1.0.5-1_amd64.deb
Note: The name of the deb package may be different.
Once all needed packages are installed, you can go ahead and enter HPE VM console, by running
sudo hpe-vm
Inside the HPE VM console, you can configure networking and preferred time zone. For the HCI scenario, it is recommended to have at least one separate NIC for isolated storage traffic. It is recommended that MTU is set to 9000 for storage networks.
Once networking and time zones are set on all the future cluster nodes, you can proceed with the installation of VM Manager. You need to run the Install wizard on the node to which you previously copied the QCOW2 image.
In the wizard, you need to specify the static address for future VME Manager, hostname, user and password, and path to the QCOW2 image.
Click “Install” once you specified all the information. The wizard will proceed with the deployment of the local VM.
Once finished, you can go ahead to the URL you specified during installation, and you’ll see that the Morpheus engine is loading. It may take a couple of minutes before the VM Manager finishes loading all the modules.
Once loading is finished, you’ll be asked to configure the Tenant and administrator account and finish the Initial setup by specifying the Appliance Name and URL you prefer and the License Key. As mentioned above, HPE VM Essentials comes with a 60-day embedded trial. The trial license covers up to 6 sockets. You can leave the License part untouched to enable the Evaluation license.
Click “Complete Setup” to proceed to HPE VM Manager.
At this point, installation is complete. To configure and run virtual machines, you’ll need to do a couple more things. First, navigate to the Infrastructure tab and create a Group in the Groups tab.
Now, click “+Create” to set up a group.
Specify the name of the group and you can optionally add labels, location, etc. Click “Save changes” to finish Group configuration.
Once the group is created, you’ll see it under the Groups tab.
You can now create a Cloud for this group. Navigate to Clouds tab and click “+ Add”.
In the wizard, specify which cloud you want to create. At this point, we are going with KVM-based HPE VME, but if you have sockets left in your license, you can add a vCenter to a different cloud.
If you choose “Private Cloud”, you’ll need to specify Name for the Cloud and optional parameters.
In the next wizard step, you’ll be asked to assign this cloud to the group or create one. Since we already created the group, we can assign the existing one.
Review configuration and click “Complete”.
After that, we can proceed with cluster creation for HPE VME nodes. Navigate to Clusters tab and click “+ Add Cluster”.
Choose HPE VM cluster and click “Next”.
Specify Group, Cloud and set the Name for the future cluster in the next two wizard steps.
In the configure step of cluster creation, you can select the Layout. If you want an HCI scenario, select Ceph Layout for HCI.
In our case, we are not using an HCI layout. Specify the hostnames, IP addresses, username and password, and configure Management, Compute interface.
Review parameters and click “Complete”.
Before configuring and deploying VMs (Instances), you’ll need to add images to the Library. Navigate to the Library tab and go to Virtual Images. Click “+ Add” and select ISO/QCOW2/RAW or VMware disk to be uploaded as an image.
Please note that if you didn’t setup File Share for the cluster or S3 Bucket, the image will be uploaded to VM Manager virtual machine which has limited storage.
Once the image is uploaded, you can finally navigate to the Provisioning tab and click “+ Add”.
Select HPE VM, select Group, Cloud and specify Name for VM.
Select Plan, Resource Pool, size of the disks, networks attached to VM, image to use and host on which you want this to spin up.
In the next wizard step, you can configure automation and backup of this instance.
Review information about instance and click “Complete”.
In the Provisioning tab, you’ll always see all provisioned VMs, their statuses, and assigned groups and clusters.
If you need more detailed information, click on the needed VM and it will redirect you to advanced VM information.
Once provisioning is done, you can connect to the VM via web-based console and proceed with installation.
User Interface Overview
Since we already covered the process of creating a cluster and VMs, we’ll check what else we have in the User Interface. Upon login, you’ll find yourself on the Operations tab; in the Dashboard, you can see Clusters, Cluster Workloads, and Cluster Capacity.
Embedded Wiki is available for all users, which might be very useful for ITOps.
In the Activity tab, you can see all the recent events and tasks completed and the user-specific tasks that were executed.
We covered the Provisioning and Library tabs above, so to keep this article as short as possible, let’s move to the uncovered parts of the Infrastructure tab. Apart from Groups, Clouds, and Clusters tabs, there are usual tabs for hypervisors such as Compute, Network, and Storage tabs.
The Compute tab shows current resource utilization in %, hypervisor nodes status. You can also dive into each node and see more detailed information.
In the Network tab, you can additionally configure Bridges, Port Groups, Routers, etc.
In the Storage tab, you can connect Buckets, File Shares, existing Data Stores (if SAN is used), and connect to SAN storage.
In the Backups tab, you can configure, review, and integrate existing backup solutions to HPE VM Manager. As mentioned above, HPE VME does have an embedded backup solution for provisioned virtual machines. At this moment, integration of 3rd party backup solutions is possible, but they are agent-based.
And there are also Tools and Administration tabs. Inside the Tools tab, you can find the “Cypher” tool that is designed to securely store and/or generate credentials to connect to your instances. Also, the “Archives” tool is designed to provide users the ability to store files downloaded by other users or used by automation scripts.
Inside the Administration tab, you can find predefined plans that you can modify or add your own. Also, you can configure your users and roles, set integrations, check the health of the Morpheus, and make additional settings.
Conclusion
The HPE VM Essentials is a recently released and in-active development product by HPE that gives you a glimpse into KVM-based virtualization and multi/hybrid cloud management powered by Morpheus Data. There are still many things to improve (for example, the current Ceph configuration only supports a single drive), and HPE works hard to deliver a better experience with every update. If you are looking for VMware vSphere alternatives, we encourage you to try it and give your own assessment of the solution. We also recommend following the official HPE guides available here.
