What needs improvement with Morpheus?

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.

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.

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.

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've been facing some challenges with Morpheus due to its design for public cloud usage. Their main focus is on allowing customers to plug in ten virtual machines to Azure, another ten to Google Cloud, and ten to AWS, as well as providing features such as guidance and cost optimization. However, we're using Morpheus for on-prem v center clouds, which is not the solution's primary purpose. We are very pleased with the dashboard and multi-tenancy capabilities, but it isn't ideal for telco workloads or advanced networking. The integration of the NSX-T needs to be refactored. As I have been working on the API, there are some issues with the workflow engine in the automation that need to be addressed. For example, I need to be able to flag a task as fail or continue on fail if something goes wrong in the workflow. Currently, if one of the tasks in a twenty-task workflow fails, the remaining nineteen are not run, which can be a problem if one of those tasks is critical, such as when patching or doing security tasks. Thus, workflow enhancements and improvements are necessary. Morpheus desires the ability to control the full life cycle of a virtual machine from beginning to end. We have many vendors who want to establish virtual machines, but we want users to access them through Morpheus. We want the VMs to be provisioned from an external system and then be managed in Morpheus so users can only perform limited activities without being able to delete or provision them. We are currently working on resolving this issue, which I refer to as reconciliation. I have asked the developers to implement multi-tenancy, where each tenant has their own landing page at a unique URL. However, we are using groups, not tenants, so there are features we can do with tenants that we cannot do with groups. Specifically, I am trying to get the developers to add notifications support so that when a group member logs in to the Morpheus portal, they can be informed of their VMs' maintenance schedule at a specific time. This is a feature I have requested them to add. We are generally pleased with Morpheus, however, due to some restraints and restrictions, we are utilizing it differently than the majority of its users. This creates some difficulty.

The service is limited and somewhat lacking. Integration is good but to make it work requires an added level of understanding that takes time to learn and is quite complex. You can switch on everything and do it all at the administrator level, but if you're providing it for a customer, it requires segregation which makes it more difficult. You have to be a Morpheus administrator for that and there is a learning curve involved. The GUI should be more user-friendly.

The tool could support virtual network functions better. It is really good at doing enterprise-type of things, but one of the things on which we're working with them is loading very complex virtual machines with it, such as Juniper SRX routers. It needs to support more complex virtualized resources a little bit better. Aside from that, it is a terrific tool. We really like it.

An integration framework is being released shortly which will allow for Morpheus customers to create their own integrations into any 3rd party product that has a full function API. This includes (but not limited to) additional cloud integrations, operational tools, and even development / DevOps tools that might be required.