Morpheus Reviews

It is our primary cloud management tool. We've implemented it, and it runs in two labs in a production environment. 

We are using its latest version.

We have 40 data centers around the country, and we use Morpheus as a way for people to log in and manage their virtual machines, cloud resources, containers, and just anything that they need to log in to and manage. It supports multitenancy. So, different groups can log in, but they see only their resources. They don't see other groups' resources.

By utilizing Morpheus as a multi-tenant portal, users can access and interact with their virtual machines, reset them, and connect to them remotely. Moreover, the automation engine allows us to upload playbooks, written in Python, PowerShell, Ruby, and Bash scripts, to carry out desired tasks and generate interesting results.

The number one reason we chose Morpheus over Nutanix Home was that we needed a replacement for the OpenStack Horizon dashboard when we moved off of OpenStack into VMware. We didn't have a license for vRA and vCloud Director. It was expensive. So we wound up choosing Morpheus for that. And what that allows us to do, allows us to take different groups within our organization, the groups can come to us and say, we want to deploy fifty virtual machines, for example. We can provision that group, and set some policies on that group. And then once they log in, they can have varying degrees of self-service that we can allow for them so that they can deploy virtual machines, tare them down, and reconfigure them. We generally take care of the networking. We have NSXT as the networking SDN, So we take care of all the networking requirements for everybody, but they can log in and plug their virtual machines into various networks, they can restart them, console into them, and deploy new VMs if they want to. They can add or reduce the CPUs, and memory. They can run automation on all their workloads. There's a workflow engine within the solution that allows us to run automation at various points within the life cycle of a machine. And it also has a future-proof capability of running clusters, so we can deploy Kubernetes clusters, but there are other kinds of clusters that are also supported. We can deploy these clusters and then deploy containerized workloads into Morpheus if we so choose to gravitate toward that aspect of our deployments. Other than a couple of test cases that we've created, we don't have anybody deploying any containers into Morpheus at the moment. What our group is responsible for is deploying firewalls, routers, and networking workloads. These are the very last to containerize because they're very difficult to containerize.

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.

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.

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.

We used Morpheus to provide customers with public cloud services.

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

Morpheus is a powerful self-service engine to provide enterprise agility, control, and efficiency. Quickly enable on-prem private clouds, centralize public cloud access, and orchestrate change with cost analytics, governance policy, and automation. Create private clouds, manage public clouds, and consolidate Kubernetes deployment. Provision applications from an on-demand catalog, API/CLI, ITSM, or infrastructure-as-code. Simplify authentication, set policies, and manage security posture. 

Has enabled us to manage our on-premises VMWare infrastructure, and our destination public cloud infrastructure of AWS, Azure, GCP, and Huawei. We have been able to use the Morpheus platform to migrate services from on-premises into the public clouds, but making sure the necessary guardrails are in place to ensure we do not waste any money. Morpheus has also enabled us to start doing DevOps end-to-end in our organisation, and manage the day-2 operations on our public cloud infrastructure.

The cloud-integration and user administration are my primary use cases. I have used the system to set up the cloud and envision VMware and AWS.

I was the only one using the product at my company.