HPE VM Essentials Free Year: Dual-Run Still Costs
HPE put a migration offer on the table at the Partner Growth Summit alongside Discover in Las Vegas. New Morpheus VM Essentials customers can take up to one year of licenses at no charge. Zerto sits at a dollar for a year of migration and protection. HPE Financial Services will finance the software at zero interest. Partners who hit Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by year-end get VM Essentials free for three years and pay support only. The pitch is the double-run: you pay the platform you are leaving and the platform you are joining at the same time.
That’s the problem.
The parent pack is the VMware Broadcom stay vs exit page: perpetual versus VCF, the support path, portable VCF on AVS, and third-party cover.
This is not a hypervisor bake-off, and it is not a gift. It is a dual-license window with year zero taken off the destination meter. This is not Tesco’s perpetual-to-subscription fight. It is also not last year’s Citrix hypervisor U-turn. Different vendor. Different offer. Year zero is not TCO. If you cannot price the Broadcom residual through the date you actually cut over against what HPE costs from year two (this week), you are walking into a migration with a promotional slide.
What HPE actually put on the table
HPE’s June 2026 press release is the primary text. A new platform migration program is meant to help partners “reduce financial risk and avoid double-paying during migrations.” New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and zero-percent interest on software through HPEFS. Separately, VM Essentials for Partner IT gives licenses free for three years, support only, to the 600 partners who gain Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by year-end. That is not a three-year holiday on your customer contract.
Fidelma Russo, HPE’s EVP and CTO, named the commercial object. You do not pay for the first year of VM Essentials licenses. You get Zerto migration licenses in that period to mitigate the “double-bubble cost problem.” CRN adds a bound: one year of Zerto Advanced Resilience Edition for $1, up to 25 VMs at a time. Russo said more than 2,000 customers and a million cores were already on VM Essentials, with up to 90 percent cost reduction claimed. Treat that as HPE’s pitch, not as your Broadcom quote.
HPE did not have to name VMware. The destination of the program is still clear.
The dual-license window is the bill
Russo named the problem correctly. You do end up with double expenses. You keep paying Broadcom on every host, socket, or core that has not moved. You start paying the destination on every host that has. The overlap is the bill.
HPE’s offer removes year-zero destination licenses from that overlap. It does not remove the Broadcom side, support on what stays, or the months you will still run two platforms. Application dependencies do not cut over on a fiscal-year boundary. Reporting around Discover also notes the free year sits on a longer-term HPE contract. A free year that requires a multi-year signature is a cash-flow concession on a term you have not priced.
If your file still says “first year free, so the move is cheap,” you are reading a reporting layer. You have a promotional SKU. You do not have a commercial outcome. Year-two destination cost against the Broadcom residual is a cost optimization question, not a gift.
This is not a criticism of the teams building those models. Traditional SAM tools were built to prove completeness on one vendor at a time, not to price a dual-run once year zero is taken off the destination side only. An analysis that arrives after you have accepted the free year is a document. One that arrives during the meeting is a decision input.
Picture your procurement director, sixty days from a VMware conversation. Infrastructure has an HPE slide: free VM Essentials, Zerto for a dollar, a year off the meter. Finance has an 800-to-1,500 percent Broadcom story from last year’s Discover cycle. The CIO wants off the Broadcom conversation. None of those is a license position.
Do not let either vendor frame the meeting as “do you want a year off the meter.” The stay number is still the Broadcom quote. The leave number is the overlap plus year two. That is the dual-license window on this estate.
Year zero is not TCO
A free year is a cash-flow concession. TCO is what you pay to operate the destination for the term you will actually sign. HPE did not publish a year-two list price. You cannot take a free year and call it the cost of leaving. You can only defer the first invoice.
Three clocks start the day you accept.
The Broadcom clock keeps running until the last in-scope workload is off, or until you keep a residual and keep paying. A shrink that leaves a VMware island is still a VMware renewal.
The HPE clock starts at month thirteen on the licenses that were free in month one. If the footprint grew during the move (and migration estates grow before they shrink), year two is the count you landed on, priced. Zero-percent HPEFS interest is a financing term. It is not a license price.
The Zerto clock is the one people will miss. Russo called them migration licenses during the free-year period. CRN priced Advanced Resilience Edition at a dollar, up to 25 VMs at a time. Those are not the same commercial object as a year of DR for the destination estate. If Zerto is how you protect what you land, price the day it stops being a dollar.
Partners have a different clock. Three years of free VM Essentials, support only, for the 600 who hit competency by year-end. If your seller is not in that 600, that offer is not in the room. The press release does not say the partner holiday is passed through.
What to cost before you take the free year
Do this before anyone signs a migration assistance form. Produce a decision pack, not a destination rumor.
| What you are being offered | What HPE published | The number you lock first |
|---|---|---|
| Customer free year | Up to one year of Morpheus VM Essentials licenses free, on a longer-term contract. | Current VMware entitlement. Broadcom cost through actual cutover. Year-two VM Essentials on the footprint you will run. |
| Dual-run / double-bubble | Russo: you end up with double expenses. The program is there to mitigate that. | Months of overlap. Residual VMware on what has not moved. Destination cost after year zero. A second operations stack is not on HPE’s meter. |
| $1 / migration Zerto | A year of Zerto for $1; CRN: Advanced Resilience Edition, up to 25 VMs at a time. | What the dollar covers, in writing. What DR costs the day the migration license ends. |
| Partner three-year free | VM Essentials for Partner IT: licenses free for three years, support only, for 600 partners with competency by year-end. | Whether your seller is one of those 600, and whether any of it reaches your contract. Support is not zero. |
Can a non-specialist brief the CIO in fifteen minutes from the pack you have today? If the answer is no, you do not have a license position. You have an HPE slide.
Your job is not to decide whether Morpheus is a VMware replacement. Your job is to walk in with the dual-run priced, and with year two visible, before anyone treats year zero as the cost of leaving.
The decision layer, not another inventory
You already have discovery data, a CMDB full of VMware records, and a renewal date on a spreadsheet. The gap is not another inventory. The gap is turning that estate into a decision: Broadcom through cutover, HPE from year two, and whether a $1 Zerto line is a migration tool or a DR estate. LICENSEWARE sits on the inventory and ITSM tools you already run. It is not a rip-and-replace SAM suite. It is a decision layer: what matters, why it matters now, what should happen next.
If you are heading into a VMware renewal or a dual-run conversation and your current tools still need three weeks to turn a free-year offer into a priced position, book an Audit Readiness Review. You can also start on the free plan and run the analysis on your own data.
The question to walk in with
Do not let the destination vendor frame this as “the first year is free, the double-bubble is solved.” The right question is: what are we actually running, what does Broadcom still cost until the last in-scope workload moves, what does VM Essentials cost from month thirteen, and what does Zerto become when it is no longer a migration license. That is a data question, not a sales question.
The vendor will walk in with a number. The only question is whether you have yours first: current, defensible, and tied to the contract in front of you.
