HPE Recognized as a Challenger in Gartner’s 2026 Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms
HPE has been named a Challenger in Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Server Virtualization Platforms. This recognition comes less than two years after announcing HPE’s intent to launch a virtualization alternative. In HPE’s view, this recognition reflects not only product innovation, but also the trust customers and partners have placed in HPE Morpheus Software to run business-critical applications and modernize their virtualization environments.
Enterprises are under growing pressure to rethink their virtualization strategies amid rising costs, licensing uncertainty, and increasingly fragmented environments spanning private and public clouds, virtual machines, containers, and AI workloads. HPE addresses this shift with HPE CloudOps Software, which helps customers modernize private clouds with enterprise-grade virtualization, manage hybrid, multicloud environments across existing and new runtime environments through a common control plane, as well as protect current investments, and modernize their environments without forced re-platforming.
“Customers want greater control over their environments, a clear path to modernize for AI, and more predictable costs as they rethink their virtualization strategies,” said Varma Kunaparaju, SVP & GM of CloudOps Software & Platform, HPE. “For us, this is a progression and a reflection of the speed at which our teams have innovated and executed, and of a bold customer-focused strategy that looks well beyond hypervisor replacement to deliver enterprise-grade software for virtualization and unified cloud operations.”
Proven Enterprise Virtualization for Production Environments
HPE Morpheus Software – VM Essentials has quickly evolved into a trusted enterprise virtualization platform. This evolution reflects the industry’s growing demand for a modern, cost-predictable, enterprise-grade virtualization platform that gives organizations greater flexibility, choice, and a path to long-term growth. customers are deploying VM Essentials across production environments supporting mission-critical applications and services. Organizations of all sizes are choosing VM Essentials for its enterprise-grade virtualization capabilities, including:
- Open, enterprise-ready virtualization with freedom to run across multi-vendor hardware infrastructure
- Enterprise-class high availability and resilience
- Unified management of virtual machines (VMs) and Kubernetes workloads
- Built-in software-defined networking (SDN) with micro-segmentation and zero-trust security
- Broad ISV and ecosystem compatibility
- Integrated automation and orchestration across the workload lifecycle
- AI-powered operations, observability, and cyber resilience
A Hypervisor Is Only the Beginning
Virtualization may be foundational, but successful modernization requires much more than a hypervisor alone. IT teams must also provision infrastructure, automate operations, observe performance, protect workloads, strengthen cyber resilience, and increasingly leverage AI-driven operations to improve efficiency and accelerate response. These capabilities become even more critical as organizations expand hybrid cloud environments and introduce AI workloads into production.
HPE CloudOps Software delivers unique value by bringing these capabilities together. Instead of relying on multiple disconnected tools, customers can combine VM Essentials with a unified cloud operations platform that helps them build, run, observe, protect, and optimize workloads the entire infrastructure estate.
- Automation and Orchestration: HPE Morpheus Software – Enterprise provides policy-based provisioning, governance, self-service consumption, orchestration, and lifecycle management across diverse environments, allowing organizations to standardize operations while giving application teams greater agility.
- Observability Across the Full Stack: HPE OpsRamp Software delivers full-stack observability across infrastructure, workloads, applications, and networks, helping operations teams identify issues faster, reduce downtime, and operate at scale with confidence.
- Data Protection and Cyber Resilience: HPE Zerto Software helps protect critical workloads through continuous data protection, disaster recovery, workload mobility, and cyber resilience capabilities designed to support business continuity and rapid recovery.
- AI-Powered Operations: HPE is bringing agentic AI capabilities to cloud operations, enabling customers to automate routine tasks, proactively identify issues, optimize resources, and accelerate remediation across hybrid environments.
Customers are adopting HPE Morpheus Software
Customers have deployed half a million cores of VM Essentials, with more than 50 percent deployed by enterprise customers, including environments spanning hundreds of virtual machines across multiple hosts. “With a lean IT team supporting one of the world’s most technologically advanced stadiums, simplifying how infrastructure is managed is critical,” said Rob Pickering, Chief Technology Officer, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. “HPE Morpheus Software gives us a path to modernize virtualization while reducing operational complexity, helping our team spend less time managing underlying infrastructure and more time supporting the technology behind match days, major events, stadium operations, and the fan experience.”
“As virtualization licensing costs increased, we knew we needed a long-term strategy rather than simply a short-term replacement,” said Dave Cawson, Sr. Network Administrator, Island Lake First Nations Family Services. “HPE gives us a cost-effective path to modernize on our own terms, maintain the tools we rely on today, and introduce HPE Morpheus Software at our own pace without unnecessary disruption.”
“Cambrian runs virtual machines supporting everything from teller and remote-employee desktops to member-facing applications and our core banking system,” said Chris Macken, vice president of IT operations and security, Cambrian Credit Union. “That makes virtualization a business-critical decision. With HPE Morpheus – VM Essentials, we can take a phased approach while building toward a simpler, more efficient environment for our team to manage.” Access the full 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms on HPE’s website.
About Gartner Magic Quadrant
Magic Quadrant™ reports are a culmination of rigorous, fact-based research in specific markets, providing a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the providers in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct. Providers are positioned into four quadrants: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. You can use a Gartner Magic Quadrant as a first step to understanding the technology providers you might consider for a specific investment opportunity. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms, Tony Harvey, Tony Iams, Paul Delory, Daniel Bowers 14 September 2026.
