HPE offers free year of VM Essentials to lure VMware customers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is aggressively courting VMware customers discontented with Broadcom's pricing. At its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas, HPE announced that customers can use its 'HPE Morpheus Software—VM Essentials' for free for up to one year. The offering includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor, unified management across VMware ESXi and HVM clusters, and migration tools via HPE Zerto for just $1. HPE also offers 0% financing through HPE Financial Services. The standard price for VM Essentials is $600 per CPU socket per year, a stark contrast to Broadcom's shift to per-core licensing for VMware vSphere, which has dramatically increased costs for many organizations.

HPE claims VM Essentials can deliver up to 90% cost savings compared to VMware, while also eliminating vendor lock-in and simplifying hybrid IT. The promotion is available only through channel partners, a deliberate move to support the reseller ecosystem that Broadcom has significantly reduced. HPE has also run a separate rebate offer (March 1 to June 30) for a free year of VM Essentials with the purchase of an AMD server. However, adoption faces hurdles: some partners note that customers operate on multi-year life cycles and face hardware shortages for migration. Others, like Nth Generation, expect their sales pipeline to quadruple thanks to the reduced risk of migration. The promotion runs through a partner competency program as well, giving 600 resellers free licenses for three years if they earn HPE's Private Cloud with Virtualization certification by year-end.