HPE is stepping up its effort to attract organizations evaluating alternatives to VMware, unveiling a migration program that provides one year of free HPE Morpheus VM Essentials licensing and access to HPE Zerto for a nominal $1 fee during the transition period.
After Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, many enterprises now face the tough challenge of balancing existing virtualization investments against dramatically rising software costs and evolving licensing requirements.
According to HPE executives, the new migration initiative is intended to reduce one of the biggest obstacles organizations encounter when moving to a different virtualization platform: paying for two environments simultaneously during the transition.
By eliminating VM Essentials licensing costs during the first year and providing Zerto migration capabilities at a token cost, HPE aims to lower the financial risk associated with platform migration projects.
Channel Incentives Accompany Migration Push
Although VMware was not explicitly referenced during the announcement, the target audience was obvious. Since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware, industry reports have cited cost increases ranging from several hundred percent to more than tenfold for some organizations, prompting many IT leaders to evaluate alternative virtualization platforms.
HPE is touting Morpheus VM Essentials as one of those alternatives. The platform is built on the KVM hypervisor and includes enterprise virtualization capabilities such as high availability, live virtual machine migration, workload balancing, and centralized management. Its ability to manage both VMware and HPE virtualized environments through a single management interface can simplify migration planning and ongoing operations.
For organizations with broader cloud ambitions, HPE also promotes Morpheus Enterprise, which extends management capabilities to public cloud environments and Kubernetes-based infrastructure. The combination caters to a growing trend among enterprises to seek greater flexibility across hybrid cloud deployments.
The migration package also includes HPE Zerto, which provides disaster recovery, data protection, and workload mobility capabilities built to move virtual machines while minimizing downtime. Organizations can prioritize the recovery of critical workloads first and restore less urgent applications in phases, helping maintain business continuity during major infrastructure transitions.
Beyond end-user customers, HPE is extending the initiative to its channel network. Partners that achieve the company’s Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of 2026 will be eligible to receive VM Essentials licenses at no cost for three years, paying only support expenses. HPE estimates that roughly 600 partners could qualify.
The company is also expanding its channel-first sales strategy. Beginning July 1, products including HPE Private Cloud PC3000, HPE SimpliVity PC1000, and HPE Zerto will be sold exclusively through partners. HPE says the move builds on the adoption it has already seen through the channel-driven rollout of Morpheus VM Essentials.
HPE also announced plans to combine its existing partner programs with the Juniper Networks partner ecosystem under the Partner Ready Vantage framework. Scheduled to take effect on November 1, the unified program is intended to provide a single engagement model spanning networking, cloud infrastructure, and AI solutions.
