Year of free HPE software a “step in the correct direction” in VMware rivalry

Year of free HPE software a “step in the correct direction” in VMware rivalry - Ars Technica

Virtualization

Year of free HPE software a “step in the correct direction” in VMware rivalry

Partner tells Ars that HPE should be giving out more free VM Essentials licenses.

Scharon Harding

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Jun 16, 2026 6:11 pm

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August 5, 2019 Palo Alto, CA - Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) corporate headquarters located in Silicon Valley.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom’s pricing of VMware.

During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its “HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials” offering for free for “up to one year,” per a press release. HPE’s website describes its virtualization platform as a “VMware alternative.” It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users “manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you’re ready,” HPE’s website says.

“New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services,” HPE’s announcement reads, referring to HPE’s group for helping IT teams manage funding.

Free for a year is cheaper than what Broadcom has charged for VMware vSphere since taking over. VMware prices have skyrocketed due to VMware’s parent company eliminating perpetual licenses and bundling products into expensive packages. Notably, per its website, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials; Broadcom has controversially shifted vSphere licensing pricing to a per-core basis.

“Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom,” Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE’s North American channel and partner ecosystem, told CRN . The executive claimed that VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to “eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT.”

Broadcom declined to comment on HPE’s promotion to CRN.

From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been offering a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who buy an AMD server and a one-year VM Essentials license.

VM Essentials is only available through channel partners, a stark contrast from Broadcom’s VMware approach, where the chip giant has drastically reduced the number of resellers that can sell VMware products.

HPE’s new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating off VMware. While numerous third-party surveys have pointed to a significant amount of VMware customers looking to reduce or eliminate their VMware use over the next few years, concerns around time and cost are also expected to slow or deter migration plans, especially given that migration can require paying for two virtualization products simultaneously.

“One of the big things we see is that as customers are going through this journey on transforming their operating model, you end up with double expenses,” HPE’s EVP and CTO Fidelma Russo said, according to The Register .

Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago, doesn’t expect the promotion to drive sales much.

“All our clients work on three, four, or five-year life cycles and generally roll that purchase into their initial buy,” he told Ars. “The biggest issue I’m seeing right now that is affecting VM Essentials sales and adoption is [that] the high prices and constraints of DRAM [are] affecting customers’ ability to obtain new hardware to migrate onto.”

Colpitts pointed to a lack of available hardware for permanent migrations and “to temporarily facilitate a brownfield reimage of the customer’s existing equipment from VMware to” VM Essentials.

On the other hand, one of HPE’s biggest channel partners, San Diego-based Nth Generation, is expecting its “VM Essentials sales pipeline to as much as quadruple and sales to grow at about that rate” because of HPE’s promotion, CRN reported .

“These additional free licensing and migration capabilities are going to drastically lower the risk of moving to VM Essentials,” Nth Generation co-president and CTO Dan Molina told the publication.

Partner promotion

HPE also announced that it would give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program’s Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. Partners still have to pay support costs, though.

Colpitts said that the benefit is “a step in the correct direction” but that limiting the promotion to 600 partners is “very shortsighted.” He believes that HPE should give all of its partners VM Essentials “to facilitate getting [VM Essentials] into customer sites and displacing the competitors.”

“They need to fling [VM Essentials] as far and as fast as they possibly [can] to immediately gain traction and draw ISVs to them, which will increase adoption even more,” he said.

Senior Technology Reporter

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She's been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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