A Perfect Storm in Hybrid IT
Enterprise IT leaders face a turbulent landscape shaped by two dominant forces: the surge of AI and the upheaval in virtualization. While organizations invest heavily in AI, their ambitions often collide with data complexity and fragmented infrastructure. And then there’s the Broadcom–VMware acquisition—an industry shockwave that redefined virtualization economics.
Following the deal, virtualization costs for many enterprises spiked—some by as much as fivefold or more—forcing companies to rethink long-standing VMware strategies. Analysts now estimate that three out of four organizations are actively exploring alternatives, up significantly from last year.
This convergence of AI urgency and virtualization disruption has left IT leaders asking: How can we modernize operations while staying in control of costs and complexity?
Locked-In and Spread Thin
Vendor lock-in remains the primary barrier to agility. Workloads built over years on VMware’s proprietary stack don’t easily migrate, and every dependency—tool, process, or policy—compounds that inertia.
At the same time, the promise of hybrid cloud often collides with operational reality. Most IT teams juggle a patchwork of environments: VMware clusters, public clouds, Kubernetes, and bare metal. Each has its own management tools, APIs, and processes. What should be a seamless “cloud operating model” turns into an obstacle course of manual steps, ticket queues, and inconsistent policies.
This fragmentation extends beyond infrastructure. Governance, security, and cost control must cut across environments, yet most teams still manage each environment in silos. The result is slow delivery, mounting costs, and strained operations teams.
HPE’s CloudOps Suite: Building a Unified Control Plane
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) saw these challenges coming. Its CloudOps suite aims to provide the control plane enterprises need to manage diverse environments as one cohesive system.
At Cloud Field Day 24, HPE showcased how CloudOps unifies provisioning, observability, and resilience under a single umbrella. The suite integrates three cornerstone platforms:
- Morpheus – Automates provisioning and lifecycle management.
- OpsRamp – Delivers full-stack observability and AI-driven operations.
- Zerto – Protects data and ensures recovery from outages or cyber incidents.
Together, these components span the entire application lifecycle—from deployment to optimization and recovery—across any cloud, hypervisor, or Kubernetes cluster.
Breaking Free from Hypervisor Lock-In
A key moment at Cloud Field Day was HPE’s introduction of Morpheus VM Essentials (VME), a KVM-based alternative to VMware’s hypervisor stack. Built on Morpheus’s foundation, VME offers VMware-grade virtualization capabilities such as high availability, distributed resource scheduling, and tight integration with storage and networking systems.
Key to HPE’s success is VME Manager which enables IT teams to manage both existing VMware infrastructure and new HPE KVM clusters through a single interface. This approach allows organizations to modernize gradually—without an immediate and costly “rip and replace.”
Migration, often a deal-breaker, also got attention. The built-in migration tool converts VMware VMDK files into KVM QCOW2 format in real time, streaming the data without doubling storage requirements. This small but crucial improvement simplifies transitions and keeps costs predictable.
Automation Without Boundaries
Morpheus sits at the heart of CloudOps as the orchestration engine that simplifies provisioning across virtual machines, containers, and clouds. It bundles essential dependencies—IP address management, DNS, monitoring agents, and backups—into automated workflows that replace error-prone manual steps.
Morpheus remains tool-agnostic, supporting over 1,300 API commands and a unified Terraform provider. This lets platform teams integrate existing investments—scripts, templates, and infrastructure-as-code—without rework. The result: faster provisioning, less friction, and more consistent delivery.
Observability That Sees the Whole Picture
OpsRamp tackles one of hybrid IT’s toughest problems—visibility. In most enterprises, monitoring remains fragmented across network, storage, and compute teams. OpsRamp breaks down those barriers by ingesting data from third-party tools such as SolarWinds or LogicMonitor via webhooks, creating a single, unified view of system health.
HPE demonstrated how OpsRamp uses AI and machine learning to correlate related alerts. If a single switch failure triggers multiple cascading warnings across layers, OpsRamp identifies the root cause and filters the noise. It can even trigger remediation workflows through Morpheus, cutting mean time to resolution and freeing operators to focus on higher-value work.
Resilience Without Compromise
The third pillar, Zerto, brings data protection and disaster recovery into the mix. It continuously replicates workloads to secondary sites or clouds, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss. When paired with Morpheus automation and OpsRamp observability, Zerto completes the cycle—deploy, monitor, and protect—all under a consistent operating framework.
Practical Deployment: Flexibility by Design
HPE emphasized that CloudOps isn’t a closed ecosystem. VM Essentials works across a range of hardware, including non-HPE systems such as Dell servers paired with Pure Storage or NetApp arrays. This flexibility helps organizations align hardware and software lifecycles independently.
To simplify operations, HPE packages VME into its Private Cloud Business Edition and SimpliVity platforms. These turnkey solutions automate initial deployment, firmware updates, and lifecycle management—ideal for IT teams without deep KVM expertise.
HPE also continues to expand its integration ecosystem. Existing interoperability between Morpheus, OpsRamp, and Zerto is now tighter, with image-based backup support already live for Commvault and coming soon for Veeam, Cohesity, and Rubrik.
Why This Matters
Today’s cloud architects operate in an environment defined by rising costs, vendor uncertainty, and operational sprawl. HPE’s CloudOps suite offers a practical path forward—one that delivers choice without chaos.
By combining automation, observability, and resiliency into a unified control plane, HPE gives enterprises a way to regain control over hybrid IT. The company’s approach—demonstrated at Cloud Field Day—balances innovation with pragmatism. It doesn’t demand sweeping change but enables incremental modernization at enterprise scale.
For IT leaders navigating post-VMware disruption, HPE CloudOps provides a credible blueprint: automate consistently, manage intelligently, and protect continuously—across every workload, on any cloud.
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