My last renewal conversation with a Broadcom rep was enlightening. Their quote came back at 3.5x the prior year. Here's the actual breakdown of what changed, what it costs, and how to calculate your number.

What Actually Changed

Broadcom collapsed VMware's portfolio from roughly 8,000 SKUs and 168 bundles down to four primary subscription bundles: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere Foundation (VVF), vSphere Standard, and vSphere Enterprise Plus.

The Four Primary Bundles: VCF, VVF, Standard, and Enterprise Plus

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) — $350/core/year (list)

VCF bundles everything VMware makes into a single subscription. It targets organizations already running vSAN and NSX, and is the tier Broadcom steers large accounts toward. The current list price is $350/core/year, reduced from the initial post-acquisition $700/core/year pricing in January 2024.

What's included:

• vSphere Enterprise Plus (compute/hypervisor)
• vCenter Standard (management)
• vSAN Enterprise (software-defined storage) — 1 TiB per core included
• NSX (software-defined networking and microsegmentation)
• Aria Suite Enterprise (operations and monitoring)
• SDDC Manager (lifecycle management)
• vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)
• HCX Enterprise (workload migration)

VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) — $135/core/year (average list)

VVF is the mid-tier bundle. It includes the hypervisor, storage, and basic management — but no NSX networking. Small and mid-size organizations that stay with VMware will likely end up here. Pricing varies by term: approximately $190/core/year for a 1-year subscription, $150/core/year for a 3-year commitment, averaging about $135/core/year across typical deals.

What's included:

• vSphere Enterprise Plus (compute/hypervisor)
• vCenter Standard (management)
• vSAN Enterprise (storage) — but only 0.25 TiB (250 GiB) per core (much less than VCF)
• Aria Suite Standard (basic monitoring)
• vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS)

What's NOT included: No NSX, no SDDC Manager, no HCX. The vSAN allocation is thin — a 32-core server only gets about 8 TB of vSAN capacity, which means additional vSAN capacity purchases are likely for environments with significant storage needs.

vSphere Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus — standalone subscription bundles

vSphere Standard remains available as a subscription bundle at approximately $50/core/year, though some customers report sales pressure toward VVF or VCF. vSphere Enterprise Plus also remains a current subscription bundle for customers that need the higher-end vSphere feature set without adopting the full VVF or VCF stack. Verify the exact SKU, term, and upgrade rights with your reseller because Broadcom packaging and discounting can vary by contract.

VCF 9.1 Hardware Requirements: The 7-Node Myth

The "7-node minimum" for VCF (4 management + 3 workload) was true for VCF 5.x. VCF 9 changed this, and VCF 9.1 keeps the same reduced floor. The actual minimums, per William Lam's lab guide and Broadcom's installer:

• 3 ESXi hosts when using vSAN (OSA or ESA)
• 2 ESXi hosts when using external storage (FC VMFS or NFS)
• The old 4-host management domain requirement came from vSAN's need for a fault tolerance host during patching — with VCF 9's updated lifecycle tooling, 3 hosts is a supported minimum for production

If you're doing capacity planning against VCF 5.x docs, re-read the VCF 9.1 requirements. The floor dropped. That said: running a VCF management domain on 3 nodes with vSAN leaves zero fault tolerance headroom during patching. If a host needs to enter maintenance mode for a VCF lifecycle upgrade, you're down to 2 active vSAN nodes. Minimum 4 hosts is still the right answer for any production cluster you actually care about.

VCF 9.1 licensing-server note: The per-core commercial model did not change in 9.1, but the operational plumbing did. VCF 9.1 updates the VCF Operations License Server workflow as part of the broader management-plane consolidation, so validate license-server placement, connectivity, and Fleet-level visibility during bringup or upgrade.

When VVF Actually Makes Sense: The Break-Even

The per-core price increase looks brutal in isolation. But it's the wrong way to evaluate VVF for shops that were already running separate Enterprise Plus, vSAN, and Aria licenses. At the old à la carte pricing (approximate historical figures):

• vSphere Enterprise Plus: ~$120/core/year
• vSAN Enterprise: ~$100-150/core/year (sold per-core, per-TiB pricing varied)
• Aria Operations: ~$30-60/core/year

Stack those up and you were at $250-330/core before volume discounts — potentially more expensive than VVF's $135/core with everything bundled. For that kind of shop, VVF is the right product at a defensible price. At 72 cores, VVF's vSAN entitlement gives you 72 cores × 0.25 TiB/core = 18 TiB of vSAN capacity. If you needed that storage capacity and would have purchased vSAN anyway, the bundled economics work.

The Per-Core Minimums: 16 Cores Per CPU, 72 Cores Per Order

There are two minimums that both apply, and they're independent of each other:

The 16-Core Per-CPU Floor

This one is simple. If a CPU has fewer than 16 physical cores, Broadcom bills it as 16. Most modern server CPUs have 16 or more cores per socket, so this rarely changes the bill for recent hardware. It does catch shops running older single-socket servers with 8 or 12-core processors — they pay for cores that don't exist.

The 72-Core Per-Order Minimum

Introduced in April 2025, the 72-core minimum per order is the one that drew the most backlash. A shop with three 16-core hosts (48 billable cores) would be forced to buy 72 cores of licensing — paying for 24 cores they don't have. For small and mid-size environments, this minimum is effectively a floor that pushes the entry-level VVF cost to $9,720/year (72 × $135) regardless of actual hardware.

The real sticker shock comes from the per-core subscription model itself, not the minimums. Moving from a $4,500 perpetual per-socket license to $135/core/year on a 32-core server means $4,320/year — every year, forever. That's where the price-increase reports come from.

Real-World Cost Examples

Specific cost examples from community forums and industry reports:

Example 1: Small Business (3 Hosts)

Example 2: Mid-Market (9 Hosts)

Example 3: Enterprise (6 Hosts, Dual Socket)

AT&T, one of VMware's largest customers, sued Broadcom alleging price increases of up to 1,050%. The lawsuit was settled out of court in December 2024 — terms undisclosed, but the case highlighted how extreme the increases were for large customers on legacy deals. Industry advisory firms report typical increases of 8x to 15x for customers who were on deeply discounted legacy agreements.

Calculating Your Real Cost

Before any conversation with Broadcom or a reseller, you need a precise core count. Use PowerCLI against your vCenter to generate an accurate inventory:

Step 1: Audit Your Physical Core Count

# Connect to vCenter first
Connect-VIServer -Server vcenter.yourdomain.local

# Get physical CPU core count per host (this is what Broadcom counts)
Get-VMHost | Sort-Object Name | ForEach-Object {
    $hostView = $_ | Get-View
    $cpuPackages = $hostView.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuPackages  # Physical sockets
    $cpuCores    = $hostView.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuCores     # Physical cores (total)
    $coresPerCPU = [math]::Round($cpuCores / $cpuPackages)
    
    # Broadcom counts each CPU at minimum 16 cores
    $billableCores = [math]::Max($cpuCores, $cpuPackages * 16)
    
    [PSCustomObject]@{
        Host           = $_.Name
        Sockets        = $cpuPackages
        PhysicalCores  = $cpuCores
        CoresPerSocket = $coresPerCPU
        BillableCores  = $billableCores
    }
} | Format-Table -AutoSize

# Get total billable cores across all hosts
$totalBillable = Get-VMHost | ForEach-Object {
    $v = $_ | Get-View
    $sockets = $v.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuPackages
    $cores   = $v.Hardware.CpuInfo.NumCpuCores
    [math]::Max($cores, $sockets * 16)
} | Measure-Object -Sum

$licenseFloor = [math]::Max($totalBillable.Sum, 72)
Write-Host "Total billable cores (Broadcom model): $($totalBillable.Sum)"
Write-Host "Effective license minimum: $licenseFloor cores"

Step 2: Calculate vSAN Storage Requirements

If you're using vSAN, calculate your raw storage against the per-core entitlement. Use William Lam's official Broadcom core/TiB calculator for precise numbers. VVF gives 0.25 TiB per core; VCF gives 1 TiB per core. If your raw vSAN capacity exceeds the per-core entitlement, you'll need vSAN Capacity Add-On licenses.

Step 3: Model 1-Year vs. 3-Year Costs

Multi-year commitments typically yield 15-20% discount versus annual list price — but they lock you into current pricing and the current feature set. Model both scenarios for your environment.

Hidden Costs Checklist

Before finalizing any Broadcom quote, verify these frequently-missed line items:

What Happened to Perpetual Licenses?

Broadcom ended new perpetual license sales in early 2024. Existing perpetual licenses and active SnS/support contracts are still honored through their term. Once support expires, you lose patches, support, and upgrade rights.

What this means for organizations still running on perpetual licenses:

• Your software still works — perpetual licenses don't technically expire. You can keep running vSphere.
• But you get nothing new — no patches, no security updates, no support once your existing contract expires.
• Some reports indicate Broadcom has warned customers about using patches released after their support expired, though widespread enforcement actions have not been documented.
• Most existing support contracts expire by October 2027, coinciding with vSphere 8's expected end-of-life.
• Running unpatched ESXi carries escalating risk — ESXi vulnerabilities are actively exploited in the wild (e.g., CVE-2024-37085, used in ransomware campaigns in mid-2024).

What About Horizon? (Now Omnissa)

If you're running VMware Horizon for VDI or virtual apps, your product changed ownership. Broadcom sold the End-User Computing (EUC) division to KKR in May 2024, and it now operates as Omnissa. Horizon is no longer a VMware/Broadcom product — your vendor is Omnissa.

What this means for existing Horizon environments:

• Existing licenses were transitioned during the spinout to a subscription model
• Horizon remains tightly integrated with vSphere — it still requires VMware infrastructure underneath
• The transition has been less chaotic than the Broadcom-side changes, but the licensing model is subscription-only going forward

What Are Your Options?

A brief comparison of the main alternatives (detailed comparison articles linked from the homepage):

Detailed comparison articles on each platform are linked from the homepage, with more in progress. Subscribe below for updates.

Key Decisions and Timing

The math matters, but timing matters more. The decision deadline is your contract expiry date — not Broadcom's. For perpetual license holders, the hard wall is October 2027 when vSphere 8 support ends. Between now and then, there are three realistic paths.

Staying on VMware (VVF or VCF)

If the budget works and the environment depends on vSphere-specific features, subscription is the path of least resistance. Negotiate from a position of knowledge: know the exact core count, understand the 72-core minimum and its renewal flexibility, and get competitive quotes. Broadcom negotiates harder when they believe you're evaluating alternatives.

For estates still on vCenter/ESXi 8.x, the supported modernization path is to move through VVF 9.1 and then to VCF 9.1 when adopting the full Cloud Foundation stack. Confirm SKU conversion, upgrade rights, and license-server requirements with your reseller before scheduling the technical upgrade.

Migrating to an Alternative

Proxmox, Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V, and XCP-ng are all actively courting VMware customers with migration promotions and aggressive pricing. Proxmox VE is free to evaluate — it takes 20 minutes to spin up in a lab. Nutanix has run migration promotions offering up to a free year for moving VMware workloads. These offers have real value as negotiation leverage even if the plan is ultimately to stay.

Running Out the Clock

Organizations with active perpetual support contracts can continue running their current vSphere version through the support period. This buys time but carries escalating security risk — ESXi vulnerabilities are actively exploited in the wild, and some reports indicate Broadcom has warned customers about using patches released after support expired.