VMware Price Comparison Calculator 2026

🖥️ Your Environment

Number of Hosts ?Physical servers. VMware requires ≥3 hosts for vSAN and HA. Pricing is per physical core across all hosts. Home labs and edge sites can run 1-2 hosts but lose HA. 4

120

CPUs per Host (Sockets) ?Physical CPU sockets. Most NUC/mini PCs are 1-socket. Rack servers are commonly 2-socket. Proxmox Standard subscription is per socket — 1P vs 2P makes a meaningful difference.

Cores per CPU ?Physical cores per socket — NOT logical cores (hyperthreads). VMware licenses every physical core. An Intel Xeon Gold 6342 has 24 physical cores regardless of hyperthreading. 16

Storage Needed (TB) ?Total usable storage capacity. vSAN OSA entitlement is 0.25 TiB usable per licensed core (before FTT overhead). For FTT=1 (RAID-5 or mirroring), divide raw by ~1.33–2x to get usable. 10TB

1 TB300 TB

⚙️ Features Needed

Shared / HCI Storage ?vSAN (VMware), Ceph (Proxmox), Nutanix DSF, Storage Spaces Direct (Hyper-V Datacenter only). All use local NVMe/SSDs on hosts to form a shared pool. If you have a SAN/NAS already, uncheck this.

vSAN, Ceph, S2D, Nutanix DSF

HA / DRS (Automatic Failover) ?VMware HA restarts VMs after host failure. DRS auto-balances load. Both require vCenter and 3+ hosts. Proxmox has basic HA. Nutanix has built-in HA. Hyper-V Failover Cluster is comparable.

Automatic VM restart, live migration on overload

Central Management UI ?VMware vCenter (1 included with VVF/VCF). Proxmox has built-in Datacenter web UI (free). Nutanix Prism Element is free; Prism Central/Pro is paid. Hyper-V uses WAC (free) or SCVMM ($1,323/OSE, optional).

Multi-host management console

GPU Passthrough / vGPU ?⚠️ NVIDIA vGPU on VMware requires a separate NVIDIA AI Enterprise license (~$3,500/GPU/yr) ON TOP of vSphere costs. PCIe passthrough is free on all hypervisors but prevents live migration of that VM. Proxmox and Hyper-V support passthrough natively at no extra cost.

NVIDIA vGPU, AMD MxGPU, or PCIe passthrough

Kubernetes / Containers ?VMware Tanzu is included in VCF only — it's a primary VCF differentiator. VVF doesn't include it. Nutanix has NKE (add-on). Proxmox and Hyper-V run any K8s on VMs. "Native" integrated K8s lifecycle management is a VCF-exclusive feature.

Tanzu, NKE, Rancher, vanilla K8s

Environment Summary

⚠️ Estimates only. Actual pricing varies by region, deal size, and reseller. Proxmox EUR prices converted at 1.08 USD/EUR. Always get a formal quote before budgeting.

📌 Pricing Sources & Methodology

VMware VVF / VCF

Broadcom list pricing via partner channel. VVF: $150–190/core/yr (shown at $170 mid-range). VCF: $350/core/yr. 72-core minimum enforced per Broadcom's Jan 2024 SKU restructuring. Annual subscription only — perpetual licensing is dead.

Proxmox VE

Community edition: free (AGPL open source). Standard sub: €110/socket/yr (~$119 USD). Enterprise sub: €440/socket/yr (~$475 USD). No per-core or per-VM licensing. Ceph storage software is free; only hardware costs apply.

Nutanix AHV

AHV hypervisor: free with any Nutanix license. NCI/NUS (enterprise features): ~$100–200/node/yr for small environments. Prism Pro: ~$100/node/yr add-on. Pricing is per-node, not per-core.

Microsoft Hyper-V

WS2025 Standard: $1,069/2-core pack, min 16 cores/server. Datacenter: $7,407/16-core + $463/additional 2-core pack. Shown as 3-yr amortized. CALs ($38/user or $19/device) are NOT included but are required.

Last updated: March 2026. To update pricing, edit the PRICING config object in the page source (top of the <script> block).

Virtualization Price Calculator

🖥️ Your Environment

⚙️ Features Needed

Annual Cost Comparison

💡 Our Take

📌 Pricing Sources & Methodology