HPE's New Hypervisor: A New Milestone in Virtualization

惠普企业服务 recently announced its new hypervisor, and it’s hard not to get excited about this announcement. This is one of the most intriguing announcements from HPE Discover 2024.

Why Release a Hypervisor Now?

Recently, the market has been seeking alternatives to VMware, not because the product isn't good but because the company's new licensing model doesn't suit everyone. The product itself is amazing and undoubtedly surpasses the current competition, but the costs are too high for some users.

In the past six months, every organization I've met with has expressed that they are starting to consider their future options. Everyone understands that the existing alternatives not only require replacing the hypervisor but also changing the data center architecture. Transitioning to HCI systems isn’t suitable for all existing workloads, and the overhead costs are clear to everyone.

So, What Solution Does HPE Offer the Market?

Let’s start by saying this isn't just a hypervisor. It’s a full Converge system that includes management of the entire stack from the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. What does this mean? With one interface, the customer can manage their servers, storage, networking, and virtualization.

Did HPE Develop a Hypervisor from Scratch?

Absolutely not. A key part of HPE's strategy over the past three years has been to take open-source tools, wrap them in management, support them, and make them accessible to companies, just as we do with Ezmeral Unified Analytics. The most popular hypervisor in the open-source world today is KVM, and that's what HPE chose.

Can We Replace a VMware Hypervisor Tomorrow Morning?

It all depends on the environment. Replacing a hypervisor is no small feat; there are many ecosystems that have been built over years with VMware at some customers. VMware is not just a hypervisor company and provides many additional services on top of its hypervisor. Beyond the VMware environment itself, there are backup systems and other elements that could pose challenges. There's no doubt that VMware is the most advanced virtualization product in the world, but there will be cases where HPE provides a more suitable solution for the customer.

What Are the Advantages of HPE's Architecture?

The management is unified, just like in HCI, with one interface for everything, but without HCI’s drawbacks. In a world where the licensing of everything is core-based – VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and others – it doesn't make sense to waste cores on storage operations. HPE GreenLake for Private Cloud Business Edition (PCBE) is completely disaggregated, with separate growth for volume, storage performance (IOPS), and CPU resources. This way, the customer can grow according to their needs and not pay unnecessary costs for cores they can’t use.

When Is This Happening?

The announcement last week, and of course, we are still learning about the subject. Here are a few things I know so far:

• When will the product be available? The announcement will be in the second half of 2024, which means it could be very soon or by the end of the year.
• Which hardware systems will be supported initially? Only HPE PCBE with HPE Alletra MP.
• Can the PCBE be managed with both HPE Virtualization and VMware’s version? Yes, but in different hardware environments.
• Can the licensing be purchased for environments with only HPE servers? Not in the first version, and there's no announcement yet on whether this will be available in the future.
• What is the advantage of HPE? It’s not just a hypervisor solution; it’s a complete platform from one manufacturer, end-to-end.
• Will there be a solution for micro-segmentation? Just as we offer with HPE Aruba 10K, here too, the solution doesn’t utilize CPU resources.
• When will HPE Zerto support KVM? Support for KVM is planned for Q1 2025.

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