Broadcom VMware Licensing Breakdown: What You're Actually Paying For Now

If you've received a VMware renewal quote recently and felt your stomach drop, you're not alone. Since Broadcom completed its $61 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023, the licensing model has been completely overhauled. Perpetual licenses are dead, per-socket pricing is gone, and everything is now subscription-based, priced per physical core.

This article breaks down exactly what the new licensing looks like, what you're paying for, and what it actually costs for real-world environments. No vendor spin, no marketing language — just the numbers.

What Actually Changed

Broadcom collapsed VMware's portfolio from roughly 8,000 SKUs and 168 bundles down to essentially two products:

The Two Products: VCF and VVF

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) — $250–$350/core/year

VCF is the "full stack" — everything VMware makes, bundled together. If you're a large enterprise that already uses vSAN and NSX, this is what Broadcom wants you on.

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)
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
• HCX Enterprise (workload migration)

VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) — $150–$250/core/year

VVF is the "mid-tier" bundle. It's what most small to mid-size shops will land on if they stay with VMware. It includes the hypervisor, storage, and basic management — but no NSX networking.

What's included:

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

What's NOT included: No NSX, no SDDC Manager, no HCX. And the vSAN allocation is thin — a 32-core server only gets about 8 TB of vSAN capacity. You'll almost certainly need to buy additional vSAN capacity on top.

The 72-Core Minimum

This is the change that has caused the most anger in the community. In April 2025, Broadcom raised the minimum purchase from 16 cores to 72 cores per order — for all products.

What this means in practice: even if your server only has 8 physical cores, you're paying for 72. Here's how that math works:

That's right — a single-socket server with 8 cores costs the same as a dual-socket with 64 cores. The 72-core minimum effectively creates a flat floor of $13,680 per year at VVF pricing regardless of your actual hardware.

For small environments with 2-3 low-core-count hosts, you could be paying 4-9x more per core than the list price suggests. This is where the "10x price increase" reports come from — and they're not exaggerating.

Real-World Cost Examples

Here's what actual organizations are reporting in 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, alleged price increases of up to 1,050% in their lawsuit against Broadcom. Industry advisory firms report typical increases of 8x to 15x for customers who were on deeply discounted legacy agreements.

What Happened to Perpetual Licenses?

They're dead. Broadcom stopped selling perpetual licenses shortly after the acquisition. As of April 2025, no new perpetual license purchases or support renewals are available.

Here's what you need to know if you're still running on a perpetual license:

• 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.
• Broadcom is sending cease-and-desist letters to perpetual license holders with expired support, warning them not to use any patches released after their support lapsed.
• Most existing support contracts expire by October 2027, coinciding with vSphere 8's expected end-of-life.
• Running unpatched VMware in production is a ticking time bomb — ESXi vulnerabilities are actively exploited in the wild.

What Are Your Options?

This is the question everyone is asking. Here's a quick comparison of the main alternatives — we'll do a deep dive on each in separate articles.

We'll be publishing detailed comparison articles on each of these over the coming weeks. Subscribe below to get notified when they go live.

What You Should Do Right Now

1. Know your numbers. Count your physical cores across all hosts. Multiply by $190 (VVF) or $350 (VCF) to get your ballpark annual cost. If you have fewer than 72 cores total, multiply 72 × the per-core price instead.
2. Check your support contract expiry date. That's your deadline for making a decision.
3. Don't panic-sign a 3-year renewal. Broadcom is pushing multi-year commitments hard. Get quotes from alternatives first — you have leverage right now because every competitor is aggressively courting VMware refugees.
4. Start testing alternatives in a lab. Spin up Proxmox (free) or request a Nutanix trial. See what migration actually looks like for your workloads before you're under time pressure.
5. Talk to your Nutanix rep about the migration promotion. They're offering one year of free licensing (up to 1,000 cores) for VMware customers through July 2026. Even if you don't switch, having a competing quote strengthens your negotiation position with Broadcom.