HPE Morpheus Enterprise

We use Morpheus for the heavy lifting in building curated marketplaces for MSPs, delivering a hybrid solution to their clients. Imagine a single marketplace that can deliver any product into any infrastructure, public or private.

We don't use it for DevOps automation. We use it for API integration with public cloud vendors. If they've already done the API integration with AWS, for example, then we use their APIs instead of doing our own.

The most beneficial features for us were the API integrations with various cloud vendors like Nutanix, VMware, AWS, Azure, and GCP. It saved us the effort of doing that work ourselves. 

However, 95% of the products developed since 2017 has not really been of value to us.  For example, we don't use the self-service catalog. We build a different catalog that sits on top of it. So, we don't really use the product for what it's designed for today.

Moreover, multi-cloud integration is not relevant to our IT strategy. We are 100% AWS and don't have a multi-cloud strategy ourselves. However, we're aware that mid to large corporates have a multicloud, hybrid strategy, which is why we developed a product.

The product has become overly complex. The biggest problem is that we find a bug, they fix the bug, but then another one pops up. We can never really deliver on the vision we had using Morpheus.

We had issues with the Jupiter service plan in Azure, which made us unable to use Azure. 

So, we waited for them to fix the bug, but then they fix that bug, and we have another bug with NSX-T (since people shifted from NSX-B). Then, to make things even better, AWS changed their APIs, which broke our Morpheus integration and stopped us from provisioning into AWS. 

We just seem to be constantly chasing our tails. We fix one bug, and then another appears. Eventually, you just say, "Okay, I won't use NSX-T, I won't use Azure, I won't use AWS," and at that point, you effectively have a broken product.

I have been using this solution since 2015. 

Stability is a big challenge. I can't make everything work. I've been working with Morpheus for about nine years, feeling like a beta tester the entire time. 

The problem is the abstraction layer Morpheus sits on has many moving parts. Their biggest challenge is maintaining these parts to effectively deliver the solution, which is where they struggle.

Morpheus as a product is scalable, but the scalability comes from the infrastructure vendor. The software itself is indifferent; it's designed to scale based on memory, compute, and storage needs. However, scaling the product from a usability perspective presents challenges.

We work with all types of customers, mainly targeting MSPs. So, it really depends on the MSP's target market.

The customer service and support are good. 

Positive

Other products I've worked with were standalone within their solutions. Morpheus aims to be the central point or the abstraction layer for all cloud services.

So, I have not used anything as heavily integrated as Morpheus.

The complexity of the deployment depends on the deployment method. A single instance is fairly simple, but a cluster is much more complex. 

However, deploying the application is not the difficult part.

Since we build on AWS, it's relatively easy to maintain. The main issue is the admin UI, which is very different from standard admin dashboards. 

So, you need to have a lot of experience to be able to navigate the dashboard And as they've layered on more and more features within the product, you've got more and more complexity.

Morpheus doesn't directly support cost optimization, but its API integration can facilitate resource optimization. It doesn't dynamically optimize resources like an aeronautic system would; it operates step by step. 

Morpheus is more of a cloud ops product rather than a FinOps product.

We've been a Morpheus customer since the early days. I know what they're trying to sell now, and you'd really need a strong use case to justify the cost.

From what we were trying to use it for, or what we are trying to use it for, I would rate the solution a six out of ten.

If you are an end client looking for a limited subset of what we're trying to use it for, it's probably going to be higher. 

This is half the battle. They've got a developer-led strategy, which is not in the right direction. They're building complexity in the product, and we're not even off first base yet. 

If you can't provision into AWS, then you're not even off first base, so there's no point in that. I would rather see stability with the core functionality than keep adding features that I don't need.

We used Morpheus to provide customers with public cloud services.

The most valuable feature of Morpheus is its strong integration with vSphere Cloud.

There is room for improvement in the user interface, which is complicated and not very user-friendly, particularly for non-tech-savvy users like customers. Additionally, there is room for enhancement in integrating Morpheus with other solutions. For the next Morpheus release, I would like to see more options for managing deployed virtual machines, such as additional features like ISO detection and better handling of copy-paste functionality. The current console interface can be challenging, especially when dealing with tasks like opening a console or entering passwords.

I have used Morpheus for a year.

I would rate the stability of the solution as a six out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of the solution as a six out of ten.

I would rate the technical support of Morpheus as a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Deploying Morpheus was straightforward. 

The pricing of Morpheus is fair.

For those evaluating Morpheus, my advice is to thoroughly research its suitability for your specific needs and consider how well it integrates with your existing solutions. Pay attention to potential challenges in integration, and ensure it aligns with your overall requirements. Overall, I would rate Morpheus as a six out of ten.

On-premises

We use Morpheus for blueprints, automation, and self-service.

Morpheus is an intuitive solution that is very easy to use. People with less scripting skills or technical skills can still use the solution.

The solution's pricing and customization need to improve. Customization in Morpheus is all set up like a cookie cutter. Although it's got a lot of flexibility, I cannot change the method given by the solution to do something. In CloudBolt, I can go into the back end and make some changes to how the solution does something. That kind of customization is absent in Morpheus.

I have been using Morpheus for two to three years.

I rate Morpheus eight and a half out of ten for stability.

The solution's scalability is pretty good.

I rate Morpheus an eight or nine out of ten for scalability.

If the customer is looking for cost optimization, I prefer CloudBolt over Morpheus.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution's deployment is very easy and doesn't take much time.

The solution is cheaper if you have less number of servers, but it becomes very expensive for a large number of servers. For example, a customer with more than 50,000 servers recently got excited about what Morpheus does as a solution. However, as soon as they saw the cost, they refused to proceed with the solution.

I am using the latest version of Morpheus.

The solution has got a lot of integrations, and it recently added the capability to build some custom outside of its main tool, whereby you can add on plugins. I would encourage them to build those plugins.

Overall, I rate Morpheus an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Morpheus is a cloud management platform with a lot of feature sets. It can provision almost any cloud features you can think of. 

Morpheus is an application-centric product, they are very good with the orchestration of hardware. When I use Morpheus, I do not need OCI or Cisco's orchestrate on top of Cisco hardware. Sometimes, I don't need specific top-of-the-rack switches, which are generally required in a legacy network. If I can build a software-defined network, I can provision it to Morpheus.

Morpheus is also good with other features that they mention in their documentation. 

Before we started using Morpheus, we faced an issue with its statements on the website. It claimed that Morpheus works with Huawei and some other clouds, which turned out to be slightly misleading. Although Morpheus worked with the Huawei public cloud, it was unable to work with Huawei's private cloud. When we dug deeper, we realized that the problem was on Huawei's side, not on Morpheus's side. Nevertheless, the statement was slightly misleading. 

We worked back and forth with Morpheus to resolve the issue, but Morpheus was not able to provide any support. None of their partners anywhere in the world have any kind of resolution or support for this issue because Pakistan, especially in this zone, is deeply embedded with Huawei products. You cannot discount the amount of equipment, storage, and already pre-installed network, which is worth around fifteen million dollars. You can't put that on a site and build a completely new Greenfield infrastructure for any cloud. It's a new, preexisting IT market. However, we did find a solution with Morpheus, which can work. But Morpheus was very resistant to the idea, even if it was their product. We have a lot of engineers sitting in Pakistan, developing Morpheus and working with Morpheus. We found a solution and notified Multi Assessment that this issue could be resolved by working with Morpheus and Huawei just like it works with VMware or other clouds. 

Unfortunately, we did not get a very positive or happy response from our peers about including this product in their range as well.

When you approach support, they may not be able to support these products. Although Morpheus's technical engineers say that they can support these products because they have worked with them, the support issues are that they cannot. 

So that was very strange for us to realize that Morpheus support may be lacking the resource tools that they should have. We now have almost the same number of certified engineers in Pakistan working with us as the number claimed by Morpheus to have - a hundred certified developers. Maybe that is why we reached that conclusion very quickly. But this is an issue we faced - that Morpheus's support may have been unwilling or unable.

There were limitations in their knowledge level when it came to purely technical support and understanding of the whole solution as a cost-effective one.

They were unable to guide you on how to use the maximum resources with minimum input. Because every end-user wants that, they don't want to buy licenses that are not needed. But Morpheus was unable to support in that case. Although they have documented it on their website, it is still very difficult for Morpheus support to provide you with any such guidance. You have to be very vigilant and resourceful and learn about Morpheus to do that kind of thing. Otherwise, you will always be used either under or over resources.

I don't think that Morpheus is heading in a very positive direction. Morpheus is deteriorating gradually day by day. However, the product is improving with every new version. Many changes are being made, which are bringing in support and help. The product could improve its own marketplace by reviewing its policy of Huawei. Huawei is already deployed in some parts of the bank's infrastructure in Pakistan, and it will be a private or hybrid cloud. We cannot take that out of the equation. We have found a resolution to work with that. However, this private cloud is also open source. The whole Huawei private cloud version is open source. They all have the same bug, which is causing all the problems for every OEM that does not support Huawei's private cloud. Huawei public cloud is okay with them. 

If Morpheus can understand that this bug exists and we have to work around it, there will be a huge market, including the number of users in Hong Kong, India, the Middle East, or Pakistan. If this bug can be resolved or acknowledged, and the way we have resolved it, we have put a solution to that, and it is also Morpheus. We have orchestrated Morpheus in a way that it started working around that part, and now it is working. Even the bank is satisfied that if Morpheus doesn't come for support for this, we have local engineers, and they will continue providing it. That's why they are going for an RSP, which might be 10,000 to 20,000 instances or more safe licenses, which is a good number. I do believe that Morpheus will be very happy once they see that the product specification mostly revolves around their solution. The required specification, although Flexera will be just as good to code in, Flexera doesn't have the right level of partners here in Pakistan. They will face the challenge that they might not be technically suitable to deploy at this time because we acquired a Morpheus partnership, but we did not get similar platinum partners for our partnership from Flexera. We are unable to get discounts for the OEMs, and the end-users cannot ask us to provide them with these tier one or tier two principal support. If Flexera comes in directly to participate, it is even better for the bank because then the OEMs will be responsible for everything themselves. We looked at all these things and found that without partners, Morpheus cannot survive. 

Morpheus has enabled its partners more than other OEMs. However, its support and documentation on the website regarding the version are quite good. But when you ask the same question from the support, it is terrible. They can make it easier for the end-user to understand the documentation because, at some levels, it is difficult to understand for the first-time user or for the normal end-user, not very technical.

It's just been one year, a little less than one year actually, as for overall. We have a few deployments of Morpheus, and they are being tested. Some of them are licensed, and some are used as open source, which provides like 25 instances or 22 instances, or something like that. But those are just test cases in the small university block or campuses. Students working on them, we provide them with training and access as well. 

The last version we deployed was 5.1.2. That was the version we had acquired a license for and used to build the demo cloud.

We keep in connection with Morpheus about stability. They always advise us to keep one step behind the latest version for increased stability, and it has been stable. However, we only have one year of experience in a specific environment, and it has not been thoroughly tested or load tested as a public cloud. It is not being provisioned publicly, so we can't predict what we will face when the World Bank opens it up for 43 or 44 million students. We have no idea what will happen when 44 million students are concurrently working on it, thinking from their own heads and doing things we did not expect. The stability will be tested then. Currently, it is not being load tested like that, and it has been good for us so far.

For now, the stability is very good, definitely an A+. I would rate it a nine out of ten. We haven't had a single crash, so it's very stable for us. However, we haven't tested it with the whole user base. But so far, we have done a lot of intensive testing, and the release version is very limited.

Morpheus is scalable. It provides options for both upscaling and down-scaling. Morpheus provides a feature where you can buy a limited number of licenses and upscale from there as long as you want. And when you stop using them, they reduce it, and it doesn't create a problem. But then the support issue comes in. If you're using one thousand licenses and managing everything with just a little bit of human effort, getting good Morpheus support might not be easy. 

However, when you buy a lot of licenses, they provide support, and sometimes you don't need support because everything and every instance are already documented and part of a provisioning platform. 

So I can probably say that Morpheus, in that case, becomes easier to use for the end-user with a slightly additional cost. But scaling up and down on Morpheus is very simple. Morpheus provides a very easy and one-click solution to scaling up and down. Scalability is a ten. It's very good, and I'm absolutely happy with it. I can't be happier, so it's ten out of ten for scalability. It's just perfect.

The customer service and support team is good but you have to push for it. When you buy a good number of licenses, Morpheus provides very good support. But when you are using it on a smaller scale when you are not a corporate or big customer with Fort Knox, and using only less than one thousand licenses or something like that, then Morpheus does provide support, but it is slightly harder to get.

Morpheus is very, very good in some cases, but the support is far away and comes from Asia Pacific Australia. There could be some second language barrier because Austrians speak English, and a lot of Pakistanis sometimes are not too good with the English language. The second thing would be that the Australian accent is much stronger than the general English accent, which people in Pakistan would understand. Maybe that is one part of the support we have seen create an issue because you need an English translator when you're working with the Australian. In the longer run, I even recommended Morpheus because now they have more than a hundred certified Morpheus engineers and office administrators. So we built a resource pool as well. Because there was a language barrier. English is a second language, which may have caused difficulties in understanding each other. They had good technical knowledge, but overall not so good. 

Neutral

The initial setup is very easy. Even someone with very basic technical knowledge can start using it. It's not difficult at all. It would have been slightly difficult if we were not the technical guys in the right domain. I would rate it a nine out of ten because of the lack of support that becomes a part of it when you're doing the initial setup. So I can't say it's easy to set up, especially if you're not too technical in the right kind of technology.

It only took us two days to deploy the solution entirely. Actually, it was initially a very green field on which it was deployed. So it didn't take very long. And once it was deployed, then it took a long time to fine-tune it with the brownfield. The reason was that we were unable to decide what to use and what not to use. Once it was deployed and we integrated it with the Brownfield, we found out that there were so many instances that we had forgotten about for years because the Brownfield had been running up and running for years. And hundreds of thousands of virtual machines were useless, not working, probably not needed, or duplicated. So those were found and eliminated, and it took a long time to fine-tune. It will still take a long time because every day, a student creates one instance, then creates another instance, forgets about the first instance, or something goes wrong. And because the student is provided with the facility, it's not too costly. So universities usually let the students do some work on it. They create multiple instances, three of which are not being used for three months, and only one is being used. We keep those resources a lot, so Morpheus can find that, but tuning is always needed. 

You have to do a manual intervention and keep looking as an administrator at what is happening with the cloud underneath. Otherwise, Morpheus doesn't take too long. It takes a very short time if it's a very green field.

Initially, there were just four engineers who were able to understand Morpheus. However, we have now increased the number to more than a hundred engineers. It's worth noting that the team of engineers who initially worked on the sizing of the infrastructure and virtualization were separate from us. They had already provided us with the input of everything we needed, such as the virtual environment, integration requirements, functionality, and what would eventually be provisioned. If we had to do that work ourselves, it would take a long time. It's a long process, approximately six months.

Although we have trained a lot of office engineers. Currently, just two of them are looking after maintenance. We are not facing any issues, which proves that maintenance is not a very intensive job and can be managed easily.

Currently, we are building a hybrid cloud that will function as a private cloud for education. It will be based on the Pakistan Education Research Network and serve 300 universities. On top of this, it will be integrated with different virtual environments like Azure, Google, AWS, and Huawei, so all its services will be available to students and faculty.

Therefore, there were a lot of silos. It is quite a complicated setup because each university has almost 50 campuses, and all of them need to be brought into one common cloud with its financials and backfilling. 

A very good thing about Morpheus is the back billing. Morpheus provides an extensive back billing solution to help with the integrated final billing solution. We integrated it capably, and it is functioning very efficiently. It is working great.

We are using it with every cloud provider. For example, only the computation might be done on Azure, and the storage and everything will be done locally. So there will be a lot of cost savings from both ends and an advantage of technology. Whatever is available locally will be provisioned from here, and what is not available locally will be provided from out there. High-performance computing was made a part of it. So when the students require very compute-intensive jobs, like GIS, they can do it on the cloud, Oracle Cloud, or the local resident cloud. It's a very promising and good thing appearing now as time passes.

Morpheus has a very flexible pricing structure. With our X solution, Morpheus cuts down the price of any other cloud by two or three hundred times when compared to VMware Cloud because we can provision the cloud from vCenter without needing vCloud foundation or director, which are expensive licenses. Morpheus licenses can cost from two to ten dollars, depending on various factors like the number of cloud instances. When the number of instances is low, it can be expensive, but when it's high, it becomes very lucrative. It overall cuts millions of dollars out of the equation. So, the license cost is not too much, around two or three dollars a month, or ten dollars a month maximum. For a new user who doesn't want to use more than a hundred licenses, that could be the price. But even with that, Morpheus still cuts down the cost of other licenses that are not needed because of CMP, which is huge. So, I think it's good enough.

You can get a license on a monthly basis as well. Basically, they go for a year contract. But when we have worked on separate models with them, we have told them that World Bank is not a very common end-user, and they might need the licenses for that very week or that very day and not ever again. So how would you license or how would you provision them? So they can provide it for a very short time as well. They can provide it for thirty days, and the number of days you can even be less than that. I know because I have worked with the license portal myself as well. However, as a policy, I don't think they go beyond and beyond the minimum threshold of the license time. But Morpheus can do it because it also has a minute's license-providing capability. So they can even provide you with in minutes.

I would rate the pricing model a four out of ten, with ten being the most expensive and one being the least expensive.

Overall, I'd rate it as an eight. It's a good product and provides a good overall experience. However, we had to put in much effort ourselves since Morpheus's support wasn't always available to help us.

I recommend that a new user have at least two or three certified resources in-house since it can sometimes be difficult to get support from Morpheus, especially if you don't have a strong technical team. If you need support and Morpheus support isn't available for a few days, it can cause problems.

Hybrid Cloud

Qu'aimez-vous le plus à propos de the product?

Nous utilisons Morpheus Data comme notre CMP de référence pour gérer nos instances déployées sur la plateforme Amazon Web Services. Il offre de nombreuses fonctionnalités qui facilitent grandement la gestion des serveurs derrière les Elastic Load Balancers et les Network Load Balancers. Nous pouvons également travailler avec des modèles de serveurs qui offrent une grande flexibilité et commodité pour nos activités de mouvement de production.

Que n’aimez-vous pas à propos de the product?

Alors que nous opérons avec un grand nombre de déploiements de serveurs, nous rencontrons quelques problèmes. Principalement, ils sont simples à résoudre de notre côté et en cas de problème de haute priorité, nous nous connectons avec l'équipe de support client de Morpheus qui résout notre problème de production en un temps minimal. Récemment, nous avons eu un problème avec la synchronisation cloud et son équipe de support a mis à jour le schéma de la base de données, ce qui a effectivement résolu le problème.

Quels sont les problèmes que the product résout, et en quoi cela vous est-il bénéfique?

Lors de l'utilisation des intégrations de sauvegarde dans AWS, Morpheus Data offre l'utilisation de procédures stockées et de justificatifs d'identité dans sa plateforme. Cela réduit la complexité liée à l'accès aux ressources AWS, car tous les rôles et politiques IAM sont définis dans leur utilitaire. Nous pouvons également fournir des spécifications sur le temps d'exécution pour nos systèmes externes sans interrompre nos tâches, ce qui est utile. Cela élimine le besoin de reconstruire le plugin à chaque fois que nous effectuons des modifications aux justificatifs d'identité utilisateur et cette fonctionnalité permet de gagner beaucoup de temps.