HPE VM Essentials: Key Features and Available Resources

HPE VM Essentials is a comprehensive toolset for managing, optimizing, and securing virtualized environments. It is an it´s the starting point for leveraging Morpheus, a recent acquisition of HPE, across the entire HPE portfolio.

Powered by the KVM-based HPE VME hypervisor, it seamlessly integrates with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s broader private cloud portfolio. It facilitates effortless scaling and upgrades to platforms like Morpheus for hybrid cloud management. Additionally, it supports Kubernetes (K8s), governance, and FinOps capabilities, ensuring comprehensive management and optimization across cloud infrastructure.

With HPE VM Essentials, you can efficiently manage existing VMware workloads, migrate to HPE’s KVM-based hypervisor, and deliver a seamless VM provisioning experience across both environments. This enables unified management and simplified VM deployment across the HPE VME hypervisor and VMware ESXi, allowing you to provision workloads on demand to the most suitable environment.

The HPE VM Essentials Manager, a virtual appliance running on the VME cluster, manages the VM Essentials stack. After deployment, an existing VMware environment can be seamlessly integrated into the VME Manager.

HPE VM Essentials is designed to be highly cost-effective. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers standalone HPE VM Essentials Software SKUs, licensed per physical CPU socket, with E-LTUS options of 1, 3, or 5 years, providing flexible pricing to meet various customer needs.

The HPE VM Essentials version 8.0.4 has been released, and it´s integrated hypervisor has core capabilities like:

• VM Live Migration. Move active virtual machines between physical hosts within an HPE VM Essentials cluster without downtime, enhancing host utilization or enabling host maintenance.

• VM High Availability. Ensure workload resilience by automatically restarting virtual machines on a different physical host in case of a host failure, maintaining continuous availability.

• Distributed Workload Placement. Automatically schedule and place HPE VM Essentials virtual machines within a cluster using intelligent placement logic to determine the optimal host for each virtual machine.

• VM Storage Migration. Seamlessly move a running virtual machine’s storage disk between data stores without any downtime.

• External Storage Support. Seamlessly integrate with existing external storage solutions (NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel) to maximize the value of current infrastructure investments.

• Built-in Backup: provides VM, Container, Host, Database, File, Directory, Volume, and Storage Provider Backup, Snapshot, and Replication capabilities. Backups can be automatically configured during provisioning or manually created at any time.

Many integrations are available, like:

• VMware vSphere. Seamlessly integrate HPE VM Essentials with a vSphere deployment to discover, provision, and manage existing and newly provisioned virtual machines.

• Native IP Pools. Leverage HPE VM Essentials’ native IP pool feature to define and manage pool IP addresses, simplifying the assignment of IPs to virtual machine networks.

• Native Secrets Management. Securely store and retrieve credentials and sensitive information for automation tasks, including bootstrapping and managing virtual machines.

• IP Address Management (IPAM) Integration. Integrate third-party IPAM solutions such as InfoBlox, BlueCat, SolarWinds, phpIPAM, and EfficientIP to automate IP address reservation and assignment.

• Domain Name System (DNS) Integration. Integrate with third-party DNS solutions, including PowerDNS, Microsoft DNS, BlueCat, InfoBlox, and EfficientIP, to automate the creation of DNS A and PTR records.

• Native Data Protection. Utilize HPE VM Essentials’ built-in data protection functionality to create and restore snapshot-based backups for both HPE VM Essentials and VMware virtual machines.

• Provisioning Task Automation. During virtual machine provisioning, execute Bash and PowerShell scripts to automate software installation and system configuration tasks.

• HPE Alletra Storage MP Integration. Integrate with the HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 storage array for direct virtual machine volume mapping, enabling granular performance configuration and array-based snapshotting.

The list of supported hardware, ISV workloads, and GuestOS for HPE VM Essentials Software can be found in the following link:

support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=dp00005501en_us

The document contains the integrations tested and confirmed to support HPE VM Essentials software and HPE VM Essentials clusters at scale. Hardware or ISVs not included in this list may be compatible but are untested.

At the product launch, compatibility and scale testing were limited to HPE hardware. As time passes, third-party hardware will be supported in addition to HPE hardware.

In terms of ISV workload, the following have already been tested/validated until this moment:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022;
• Oracle Database 19c;
• MongoDB Enterprise Advanced 8.0.0;
• Omnissa Horizon 8.13.1 build 11490723527.

Integrating HPE VME with Veeam and Cohesity is possible using backup agents.

Regarding Guest OS, the following were validated until this moment:

• Windows Server 2022;
• RHEL 9.3;
• CentOS 8;
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15-SP6.

Ubuntu 22.04 must be installed on all compute hosts before deploying VME standalone. This operating system, along with essential components such as KVM, Ovirt, OvS, and PCS, is the foundation for hosting VME.

HPE may certify more base/host Operating Systems in the future.

Technical White Paper: Deploying virtualized Microsoft SQL Server

HPE VM Essentials offers a cost-effective virtualization platform for SQL Server, featuring socket-based licensing. It ensures on-premises security and accessibility while delivering the high performance typically expected from a local deployment.

A technical document provides an overview of SQL Server running within HPE VM Essentials, highlighting its user-friendly features and key functionalities. It demonstrates how this virtualization environment can be an affordable and efficient alternative to VMware for managing your SQL Server infrastructure.

You can access the document here:

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50012536enw?section=Product%20Documentation

The following figure provides a high-level overview of Microsoft SQL Server running on an HPE VM Essentials stack. In this setup, an HPE Alletra Storage MP B10000 is utilized to deliver both Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity to the HPE VM Essentials cluster, enabling either protocol to create virtual machines.

The future evolution of HPE VM Essentials will likely focus on deeper integration with next-generation cloud technologies, enhanced automation through AI, and greater flexibility to manage a wide range of workloads.

Stay tuned!

References and interactive demo:

https://www.hpe.com/br/en/hpe-vm-essentials.html

https://www.hpe.com/br/en/hpe-vm-essentials/get-started.html

https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a50004260enw.pdf?jumpid=in_pdp-psnow-qs

https://hpevm-docs.morpheusdata.com/en/latest/release_notes/current.html

https://hpevm-docs.morpheusdata.com/en/latest