morpheus-docs/corpus/morpheus_quickspecs/a50009231enw.md

In an era of digital transformation, speed and agility of application modernization is key to success.

It can take weeks for IT to deliver new application stacks because of manual hand-offs across a fragmented set of ‘software-definable’ technologies on premises. This inefficiency has led internal IT consumers often bypassing IT in favor of public cloud application services which both raises cloud costs and opens security holes.

Born to provide simple and consistent provisioning of VMs, Containers, and Applications into any private or public cloud, HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software enables IT to become a true internal service provider for the business. It brings the cloud experience on-premises, extends governance to the public clouds, and bridges the gaps between technology, people, and process.

Overview

HPE Morpheus Software is a versatile platform available in two editions: Enterprise and VM Essentials. The Enterprise edition is engineered for hybrid cloud management, enabling enterprise teams to efficiently meet their specific needs. IT and platform teams can rapidly integrate tools and dependencies without scripting, standardize cloud operations, simplify server provisioning, and automate lifecycle tasks. Infrastructure and security teams benefit from connecting third-party identity providers, managing roles and policies, enforcing RBAC, and handling secrets management. Development, data analytics, and other IT users gain on-demand provisioning of application services and stacks across multiple runtimes and clouds via GUI, ITSM plugins, IaC providers, APIs, CLI, and CI/CD pipelines. Managed Service Providers can leverage Morpheus as a white-labeled, multi-tenant portal to deliver services and meter usage for customer billing.

The VM Essentials edition is tailored for hypervisor management, providing a KVM-based HVM hypervisor with enterprise-grade features such as high availability, live migration, distributed workload placement, data protection, security hardening, and external storage support. It also offers seamless management of existing VMware clusters, enabling unified VM provisioning across both HVM and VMware ESXi™ platforms. This allows organizations to provision workloads flexibly and on demand, with the additional capability to convert VMware images to Morpheus-managed environments, offering operational flexibility with minimal vendor lock-in.

Validated Hardware and Software

The list of validated compute and storage hardware for the HVM hypervisor can be found in the compatibility matrix, along with validated operating systems and ISV software.

Standard Features

Features

Enable Self-service Provisioning of any Workload into any Cloud On-demand

• − Integrate Hypervisors, Public Clouds, Kubernetes Clusters, IP address management, DNS, Load Balancers, IT Service Management, Backup Tools, Automation Tasks, and more into framework to automate workload deployment.
• − Turn existing 'brownfield' hypervisors into a true private cloud by easily connecting to VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, Oracle, OpenStack, etc. Unify public cloud access by connecting to AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, etc.
• − Eliminate manual handoffs and orchestrate the tools and dependencies for catalog-based deployment of Bare Metal (BMaaS), VMs (IaaS / VMaaS), containers (CaaS), App Services (PaaS), multi-tier application stacks, and public cloud services.
• − Associate automation tasks to the lifecycle phases of workloads so IT processes can be consistently applied at startup, shutdown, reconfigure, teardown, etc. Task support includes Ansible, Chef, Salt, PowerShell, Bash, and more.
• − Trigger provisioning activities through your interface of choice including a simple self-service catalog GUI, powerful advanced GUI interface, full fidelity API/CLI for integration into CI/CD pipelines, or leverage ITSM tools such as ServiceNow®.

Provision Built-in KVM and Kubernetes Runtime Options for Flexibility and Choice

• − Deploy and manage HPE's HVM hypervisor clusters. Based on KVM, this built-in runtime includes external storage support, VM live migration, storage live migration, data protection, and other features to host virtualized workloads.
• − Use the built-in CNCF certified Kubernetes Service (HKS) to deploy Kubernetes on any attached cloud. Includes open-source components such as Prometheus, Grafana, Calico, and others to quickly get started with containers.
• − Create custom Kubernetes cluster layouts to deploy distributions such as Rancher’s K3s, Red Hat OpenShift, or vanilla upstream Kubernetes as well as enable provisioning of cloud-managed Kubernetes clusters like AWS EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE.
• − Quickly view status and health of HVM and Kubernetes clusters across your environment to simplify operations, view cluster metrics and logs, and provide lifecycle management of HPE native HVM and HKS cluster types.

Set Governance Guardrails so Users and Teams have a Paved Road to Hybrid Cloud

• − Govern tenants, teams, and users by connecting to corporate identity providers and using SSO. Map groups and users into fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC) guardrails with dozens of policies for infrastructure and lifecycle management.
• − Improve your overall security posture by ensuring consistent golden template use, embedding security agents at provision time, locking down access, rotating credentials, managing secrets, and auditing all activity.
• − Utilize multi-tenancy to fully segregate which teams and users have access to different cloud environments. Share hypervisors and clouds across multiple tenants or let tenants have their own individual cloud accounts.

Embrace FinOps and Lower Cost with Cross Cloud Visibility and Insight

• − Automatically discover and inventory existing instances and objects across all private and public clouds, run analytics to find problems and implement guidance recommendations for cloud cost saving.
• − Go beyond reporting to fix cost issues at their source. Set budget guardrails and power schedules, limit clouds and plans by role, plus provide cloud cost comparisons at provision time for end-user empowerment.
• − Centralize cost and usage data across on-premises and public cloud. Track costs and usage for every tenant, user, group, tag, app, cloud, and more for private infrastructure and public cloud including public cloud invoice synchronization.

Accelerate network deployment, configuration changes, and troubleshooting with Software Defined Networking

With the SDN plugin, HPE Morpheus Enterprise customers can obtain simplified network operations, increased security between workloads, flexibility, and scalability of network deployment.

• − Increased control with greater speed and flexibility with SDN. The SDN controller manages the network and enables rapid changes to be made based on network and workload demands, improving overall performance of the traffic flows.
• − SDN provides customizable network infrastructure that allows administrators the ability to configure network services and allocate virtual resources in real time through the SDN Controller. This allows network administrators to optimize the flow of data through the network and prioritize applications that require more availability.
• − SDN eases network micro-segmentation by creating network zones that isolate workloads from one another and securing them individually. Using micro-segmentation, system administrators can build policies to limit network traffic between segments based on a zero-trust security approach.

For a complete set of up-to-date technical information and integration guides please visit the:

HPE Morpheus Enterprise documentation site.

HPE Morpheus Software – VM Essentials

Enterprise Virtualization

• − VM Live Migration: Migrate running virtual machines from one physical host to another within an HVM cluster without downtime to improve host utilization or to perform host maintenance.
• − VM High Availability: Enable workload resiliency with virtual machine high availability to quickly restart virtual machines on another physical host in the event of a host failure.
• − Distributed Workload Placement: Dynamically schedule the placement of virtual machines within an HVM cluster based on intelligent placement logic that determines the optimal host for the virtual machine.
• − VM Live Storage Migration: Migrate a running virtual machine’s storage disks from one datastore to another without downtime.
• − External Storage Support: Integrate with existing external storage (NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel) to take advantage of existing infrastructure investments.

Solution Integrations

• − VMware vSphere Integration: Integrate VM Essentials with a vSphere deployment to discover existing virtual machines, provision new virtual machines, as well as manage provisioned or discovered machines.
• − Native IP Pools: Assign virtual machine IP addresses using the VM Essentials native IP pools feature to define and manage pools of IP addresses associated with virtual machine networks.
• − Native Secrets Management: Securely store and retrieve credentials and other sensitive information used in automation tasks for bootstrapping and managing managed virtual machines.
• − IP Address Management (IPAM) Integration: Integrate 3rd party IPAM solutions (InfoBlox, BlueCat, SolarWinds, phpIPAM, EfficientIP) to automate the reservation and assignment of IP address.
• − Domain Name System (DNS) Integration: Integrate 3rd party DNS solutions (PowerDNS, Microsoft DNS, BlueCat, InfoBlox, EfficientIP) to automate the creation of DNS A and PTR records.
• − Native Data Protection: Create and restore snapshot-based backups for VM Essentials and VMware virtual machines using the native data protection functionality.
• − Data Protection Integration: Integrate 3rd party Data Protection solutions (Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam) to create backup jobs during the creation of a VMware virtual machine and restore backups through the VM Essentials web interface.
• − Provisioning Task Automation: Execute automation scripts (Bash and PowerShell) during the provisioning of virtual machines to orchestrate bootstrap operations such as software installation and system configuration.
• − HPE Alletra Storage MP Integration: Integrate with the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 storage array to utilize direct virtual machine volume mapping to the storage array to enable granular performance configuration and array-based snapshotting.

Virtual Machine Management

• − Power Operations: Start, stop, and restart VMWare and HVM virtual machines.
• − Snapshot Management: Create, revert, and delete virtual machine snapshots for VMWare and HVM virtual machines.
• − Virtual Hardware Management: Add and remove virtual hardware such as hard disks, network interfaces, CPU and memory from a managed virtual machine (VM Essentials or VMware).
• − Integrated Backup Management: Create, restore, and delete virtual machine backups for VMware and HVM virtual machines.
• − HTML5 Console: Access the console of managed virtual machines via the VM Essentials manager web interface with support for Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Secure Shell (SSH), and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).
• − Day 2 Task Automation: Execute automation scripts (Bash and PowerShell) against managed virtual machines to perform day 2 operational tasks such as freeing up disk space or updating system packages.
• − Tag Management: Create and manage virtual machine tags for VMware and VM Essentials virtual machines.

Configuration Information

Architecture and Requirements

HPE Morpheus Enterprise is a software-based appliance installation capable of orchestrating many clouds and hypervisors. Before an installation is started, it is important to understand some of the base requirements. HPE Morpheus Enterprise provides a wide array of options when it comes to deployment architectures. It can start as a simple one machine instance where all services run on the same machine, or it can be split off into individual services per machine and configured in a high availability configuration, either in the same region or cross-region.

There are four primary tiers of services represented within the Morpheus appliance. They are the Application Tier, Transactional Database Tier, Non-Transactional Database Tier, and Message Tier. Each of these tiers have their own recommendations for High availability deployments that we need to cover.

Configuration options:

• − Single Host (All-In-One/default): All tiers running on a single host. The reconfigure process installs all required services. This is the default configuration.
• − Single Hosts with Distributed Service(s): Transactional Database, Non-Transactional Database, and/or Message tiers are externalized, with the remaining services on a single host.
• − Clustered Hosts with Distributed Transactional Database (3-Node HA): Application, Message and Non-Transactional tiers are installed and clustered on three or more hosts, with all three hosts pointing to externalized database tier.
• − App Host(s) with Distributed Services (Full HA): Application tier is installed on one or more hosts. All UI hosts point to externalized Transactional Database, Non-Transactional Database, and Message Tiers.

Additional configuration details are available at the HPE Morpheus Enterprise documentation site.

Product, Services, and Licensing Considerations

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is making the following HPE Morpheus Software SKUs available as term-based licensed software, not a fully managed SaaS deployment. This makes HPE Morpheus Software an excellent choice for highly regulated environments with tight security guidelines.

HPE Morpheus Software – Enterprise SKUs are licensed per physical CPU socket for any connected on-premises cloud including Bare Metal (BMaaS) servers, hypervisor hosts, and Kubernetes worker nodes.

HPE Morpheus Software - VM Essentials SKUs are licensed per physical CPU socket for purposes of running and managing both the HVM hypervisor and VMware vSphere.

HPE Morpheus Software - Enterprise can also be used to provision workloads into public clouds like AWS, Azure, GCP, and more; public cloud workloads are factored at a 15 workload to 1 socket ratio. For example, 15 AWS EC2 instances would consume 1 socket license.

New installations of HPE Morpheus Software - Enterprise require installation and configuration services provided by HPE. All software licenses for HPE Morpheus Software - Enterprise include 24x7 support in the form of HPE Tech Care Essentials as part of the license cost. HPE also highly recommends that customers attend the HPE Morpheus Enterprise – Administration training class to fully take advantage of the capabilities of the platform.

You can upgrade from HPE Morpheus Software - VM Essentials to the full capabilities of HPE Morpheus Software - Enterprise using the upgrade options below. Upgrade licenses can be applied to an existing installation; however, you should consult with HPE on any suggested architectural considerations. You can also apply additional licenses to an existing installation and ‘stack’ licenses with differing term lengths.

HPE Morpheus Software
Description	SKU
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 1-year 24x7 Support New Install E-LTU	S6E64AAE
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 3-year 24x7 Support New Install E-LTU	S6E66AAE
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 5-year 24x7 Support New Install E-LTU	S6E68AAE
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 1-year 24x7 Support Extension/Renewal E-LTU	S6E59AAE
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 3-year 24x7 Support Extension/Renewal E-LTU	S6E61AAE
HPE Morpheus Enterprise Software per Socket (15 WLE) 5-year 24x7 Support Extension/Renewal E-LTU	S6E63AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials to Morpheus Enterprise Software Upgrade 1-year 24x7 Support E-LTU	S6E69AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials to Morpheus Enterprise Software Upgrade 3-year 24x7 Support E-LTU	S6E71AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials to Morpheus Enterprise Software Upgrade 5-year 24x7 Support E-LTU	S6E73AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software per Socket 1-year E-LTU	S5Q81AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software per Socket 3-year E-LTU	S5Q82AAE
HPE Morpheus VM Essentials Software per Socket 5-year E-LTU	S5Q83AAE
HPE Morpheus Services
Description	SKU
HPE Morpheus Software Installation - standard	HA124A1#V38
HPE Morpheus Software High Availability - enhancement	HA124A1#V39
HPE Morpheus Software Remote Start-up VM essentials	HA124A1#V49
HPE Morpheus Software Remote Start-up enterprise	HA124A1#V38
HPE Morpheus Software Remote Start-up High Availability enterprise	HA124A1#V39
Notes: For fully advanced services and custom statements of work, please work with the HPE Advisory and Professional Services (HPE A&PS) team. HPE A&PS have a full set of consulting and services focused on HPE Morpheus Software for multi-cloud management: https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00141555enw
HPE Morpheus Training and Education
Description	SKU
HPE Morpheus Software – Administration	H45ZD
HPE Morpheus Software - Automation & Advanced Provisioning	H45ZC
HPE Morpheus Software - Advanced Troubleshooting	H45YY
HPE Morpheus Software - Installation	H45YZ

Summary of Changes

Date	Version History	Action	Description of Change
03-Aug-2026	Version 5	Changed	HPE Morpheus Software – Enterprise and VM Essentials detailed information integrated on this version.
16-Jun-2026	Version 4	Changed	Standard Features section was updated. This version integrates the 9.0 software release. Main changes: - − Simplified and centralized network management through the SDN controller - − Faster deployment and real-time network configuration changes - − Improved application performance and optimized traffic flow - − Scalable infrastructure that adapts to dynamic workload demands - − Enhanced security with micro-segmentation and workload isolation - − Support for zero-trust policies with granular traffic control - − Greater flexibility to customize network services and allocate resources dynamically
16-Mar-2026	Version 3	Changed	New product functionality and SKU information have been added.
22-Sep-2025	Version 2	Changed	HPE Rebranding applied
05-May-2025	Version 1	New	New QuickSpecs

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