The Complete Guide to HPE Morpheus Software

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials

HPE Morpheus VM Essentials provides a virtualisation solution for organisations that want to manage virtual machines across HPE’s HVM hypervisor and existing VMware vSphere environments.

HVM is HPE’s KVM-based hypervisor and is included with VM Essentials. It provides an alternative platform for running virtualised workloads, with capabilities including high availability, live VM migration and intelligent VM placement.

Importantly, organisations do not have to move their entire virtualisation estate onto HVM to use VM Essentials.

VM Essentials can integrate with VMware vSphere, providing a unified provisioning and management experience for HVM and VMware virtual machines. This allows organisations to retain VMware where it remains appropriate while introducing HVM for other workloads.

Integrations with services such as IP address management (IPAM), DNS and automation tools can also be used to automate steps within the VM provisioning process.

For organisations reviewing the cost, complexity or long-term direction of their existing virtualisation estate, this provides an opportunity to introduce greater choice without requiring an immediate wholesale migration.

HPE Morpheus Enterprise

HPE Morpheus Enterprise extends beyond virtual machine management to provide broader hybrid cloud management and orchestration.

It enables organisations to provision and manage virtual machines, containers, applications and cloud services across private and public cloud infrastructure.

Existing environments can be integrated into the platform, including technologies from VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, Oracle and OpenStack, alongside public cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Organisations can therefore use Morpheus as a common operational layer across a heterogeneous infrastructure estate.

What Does HPE Morpheus Enterprise Do?

Hybrid Cloud Management

One of the central functions of HPE Morpheus Enterprise is providing consistent management across infrastructure that would otherwise require separate tools and processes.

An organisation may have applications running across its own data centre, VMware infrastructure, private cloud, Kubernetes and several public cloud platforms. Without a common management layer, teams can end up maintaining different provisioning processes, policies and management tools for each.

Morpheus brings these environments into a common control plane.

IT teams can use this to manage provisioning and workload lifecycle processes while maintaining visibility across their infrastructure.

This approach can also help organisations avoid tying their operating model too closely to an individual infrastructure provider. Workloads can instead be placed according to factors such as technical requirements, policy, performance and cost.

Self-Service Provisioning

Infrastructure provisioning can involve several teams and systems.

A request for a new virtual machine, for example, might require an IP address to be assigned, DNS to be configured, security policies to be applied and other services to be connected before the resource is ready for use.

Morpheus allows these dependencies to be incorporated into standardised provisioning processes.

Approved resources can then be made available through a self-service catalogue, enabling users to request infrastructure without requiring IT teams to manually complete every stage of the deployment.

Access can be controlled according to the individual or team’s role, with policies and approval processes used to determine which resources users are permitted to deploy.

Resources can also be provisioned through an API or CLI and integrated into CI/CD pipelines and IT service management platforms.

The aim is not to remove IT control, but to reduce unnecessary manual processes while giving users quicker access to approved resources.

Automation and Orchestration

Automation is another core component of HPE Morpheus.

Processes can be applied throughout the infrastructure lifecycle, covering initial deployment through to ongoing management and eventual decommissioning.

This can include tasks associated with:

• Provisioning
• Configuration
• Application deployment
• Scaling
• Patching
• Migration
• Reconfiguration
• Shutdown
• Decommissioning

Morpheus can also integrate with existing automation and configuration management technologies.

Rather than introducing automation as another isolated tool, organisations can use Morpheus to orchestrate different systems and processes as part of a wider infrastructure workflow.

This can reduce manual hand-offs between teams and help ensure that common operational processes are applied consistently.

Governance and Security

Increasing self-service and infrastructure choice can create governance challenges if users are able to provision resources without appropriate controls.

HPE Morpheus allows organisations to introduce policies and guardrails around infrastructure consumption.

The platform can integrate with corporate identity providers and Single Sign-On, with role-based access controls used to determine which infrastructure, services and actions are available to different users.

Multi-tenancy can provide separation between teams or customers, while policies can be applied to infrastructure and workload lifecycles.

Organisations can also use standard templates, manage credentials and secrets, control access and maintain an audit trail of activity.

The objective is to give users greater flexibility without removing the controls required by IT and security teams.

Cloud Cost Management

The flexibility of public cloud can make it easy for resources and costs to grow without the same visibility organisations traditionally had over their own infrastructure.

HPE Morpheus Enterprise includes FinOps capabilities designed to provide greater visibility of infrastructure usage and expenditure across private and public cloud.

The platform can discover existing resources and analyse the environment to identify potential opportunities for cost optimisation.

Organisations can introduce budget controls and power schedules, restrict the clouds and resource plans available to particular users and provide cost comparisons during provisioning.

Cost and usage information can also be viewed across different tenants, teams, users, applications, tags and cloud environments.

This gives IT and FinOps teams greater insight into where resources are being consumed and can help organisations make more informed decisions about where workloads should run.

Integrations

Few organisations have the opportunity, or desire, to replace their entire IT management estate when introducing a new platform.

HPE Morpheus has therefore been designed to integrate with existing infrastructure and operational tooling.

HPE supports more than 100 out-of-the-box integrations across areas including:

• Hypervisors
• Public cloud platforms
• Identity providers
• IPAM
• DNS
• IT service management
• Configuration management
• Load balancing
• Backup
• Automation

An extensible plugin architecture also enables organisations to develop integrations for internal or specialist systems where required.

This allows Morpheus to operate as an orchestration and management layer across an existing technology estate rather than creating another isolated management environment.

Kubernetes and Containers

Modern infrastructure strategies increasingly need to accommodate both traditional virtual machines and containerised applications.

HPE Morpheus Enterprise provides Kubernetes capabilities alongside its virtualisation and cloud management functionality.

HPE’s Kubernetes service can be used to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters, while organisations can also create custom cluster layouts for other Kubernetes distributions and provision managed Kubernetes services from public cloud providers.

This gives organisations a common platform from which to manage traditional VM-based applications alongside newer cloud-native workloads.

For businesses at different stages of application modernisation, this can be particularly useful. Existing applications do not need to be modernised before the organisation can introduce a more consistent cloud operating model.

Network Automation

Infrastructure provisioning doesn’t end with compute and storage.

Applications and workloads also depend on networking services being configured correctly, which can add further manual stages to deployment.

HPE Morpheus supports software-defined networking integrations and can automate network services as part of infrastructure provisioning.

This includes capabilities such as load balancing, routing and micro-segmentation.

By incorporating networking into automated workflows, organisations can reduce the number of manual dependencies involved in deploying infrastructure while applying network policies more consistently.

HPE Morpheus for Virtualisation

Managing HVM and VMware Environments

Virtualisation has become an increasingly important part of the Morpheus proposition.

Many organisations are currently reviewing their virtualisation estates and considering whether their existing approach continues to provide the flexibility and economics they require.

HPE Morpheus gives organisations the ability to operate HVM alongside VMware rather than requiring an immediate choice between the two.

From the same management environment, IT teams can provision and manage HVM and VMware virtual machines. Existing VMware templates can also be used when provisioning VMware workloads through VM Essentials.

HVM itself provides enterprise virtualisation capabilities including high availability. If a physical host fails, affected virtual machines can be restarted on another host within the cluster.

Live migration allows running VMs to be moved between physical hosts without downtime, supporting maintenance and improving utilisation across the cluster.

Intelligent placement capabilities can also determine an appropriate host for new VMs based on the available resources within the cluster.

Moving from VMware with HPE Morpheus

For organisations considering alternatives to VMware, one of the potential advantages of HPE Morpheus is the ability to take a phased approach.

A large virtualisation estate can contain hundreds or thousands of workloads with different technical requirements and dependencies. Attempting to move every workload to a new platform simultaneously may introduce unnecessary complexity and risk.

Instead, organisations can assess which workloads need to remain on VMware and which are appropriate candidates for HVM.

VMware and HVM environments can then be managed alongside one another while migrations are planned and completed according to business requirements.

HPE has also introduced enhanced migration capabilities for moving VMware workloads to HVM, including automated validation and other tools designed to reduce the complexity involved in migration.

This means HPE Morpheus should not simply be considered a direct VMware replacement. It provides organisations with another virtualisation option and, importantly, a way of managing multiple approaches within the same environment.

Who is HPE Morpheus Suitable For?

HPE Morpheus is particularly relevant to organisations managing increasing infrastructure complexity.

This could include businesses that:

• Operate across private and public cloud environments
• Manage several hypervisors or cloud platforms
• Have a significant VMware estate
• Are reviewing their existing virtualisation strategy
• Want to introduce an alternative virtualisation platform
• Need greater visibility across hybrid infrastructure
• Want to provide infrastructure self-service
• Have significant manual provisioning processes
• Need stronger governance across cloud environments
• Want better visibility of cloud expenditure
• Are introducing Kubernetes alongside traditional VM workloads
• Want to reduce dependency on individual infrastructure vendors

For organisations with relatively simple infrastructure requirements, the breadth of Morpheus Enterprise may not be necessary. VM Essentials can provide a more focused option where the primary requirement is virtualisation.