This sponsored explainer from The Register, produced with HPE, argues that organisations facing rising virtualisation costs and licensing pressures should resist the urge to simply swap hypervisors and instead rethink how virtual workloads are placed, managed, secured and governed across their entire hybrid IT estate. It contends that a straight platform swap or lift-and-shift migration merely relocates existing operational complexity rather than resolving it, particularly as workloads increasingly span datacentre clusters, alternative hypervisors, private and public cloud, containers and edge sites.

The piece recommends starting with workload requirements rather than platform choice, assessing whether each workload is best suited to VMs, containers or the cloud based on performance, cost, control and governance needs, and building in security controls such as identity, access and recovery from the outset rather than retrofitting them. It notes most organisations will modernise in phases rather than all at once, and cites HPE's Morpheus Software VM Essentials as one route into this transition, designed to reduce licensing exposure and vendor lock-in while coexisting with existing VMware and KVM setups. HPE positions the effort within its broader multi-generation compute strategy alongside ProLiant hardware, iLO security and Compute Ops Management.