Hewlett Packard Enterprise is offering its virtualization software for free for up to a year, a direct challenge to Broadcom's pricing of VMware that has drawn complaints from enterprise customers and resellers across the industry.
HPE made the announcement at its Discover event in Las Vegas this week, according to Ars Technica. The product, called HPE Morpheus Software VM Essentials, is described on HPE's website as a VMware alternative. It includes a hardware virtual machine hypervisor and unified management tools that allow customers to manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from a single console while migrating at their own pace.
"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 stated.
The promotion is aimed squarely at customers who have been hit by Broadcom's pricing changes since the chip company acquired VMware. Broadcom eliminated perpetual licenses and bundled products into larger, more expensive packages. It also shifted vSphere licensing from a per-socket model to a per-core basis, which dramatically increased costs for many organizations. HPE's standard price for VM Essentials is listed on its website at $600 per CPU socket per year, a structure it is positioning as simpler and cheaper than Broadcom's approach.
Jeremiah Jenson, vice president of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, described the situation plainly. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jenson told CRN. He said VM Essentials could deliver up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while helping to eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT.
Broadcom declined to comment on HPE's promotion when contacted by CRN.
VM Essentials is sold exclusively through channel partners, which sets it apart from Broadcom's VMware strategy. Broadcom has sharply reduced the number of resellers authorized to sell VMware products since taking over, a move that has frustrated many in the channel. HPE's decision to go the opposite direction, distributing only through partners, is a deliberate contrast.
HPE has been running a related offer since March 1 through June 30, giving a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who purchase an AMD server along with a one-year VM Essentials license.
The free-year promotion generated measured praise from at least one industry observer quoted by CRN, who called it a step in the correct direction for customers looking to move away from VMware. Whether it translates into large-scale migration away from Broadcom's platform will depend on how many organizations are willing to take on the complexity of switching virtualization infrastructure, even with financial incentives in place.
