When Broadcom completed its $61 billion acquisition of VMware in November 2023, it immediately began dismantling the product portfolio that had made VMware the dominant force in enterprise virtualisation for two decades. Within weeks, more than 56 standalone products were discontinued. By February 2024, all perpetual licences were withdrawn. What emerged in their place was a radically simplified — and significantly more expensive — set of four subscription bundles.
For IT leaders, procurement teams, and CFOs, this transformation created an urgent need for clarity. Which products still exist? What was included in which bundle? Where did previously purchased standalone capabilities land? And perhaps most importantly: what does this mean for your renewal budget?
This article answers all of those questions. We map the new portfolio in full detail, explain the pricing logic, and identify the strategic options available to organisations that no longer want to accept Broadcom's pricing structure on its own terms.
The Four Remaining Bundles
Broadcom has reduced the entire VMware product stack to four commercial offerings. Everything else has either been folded into these bundles or discontinued entirely. The four offerings are VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), vSphere Enterprise Plus, and vSphere Standard. Each targets a different buyer profile, and the gap in capability and cost between the top and bottom tiers is significant.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
VCF is Broadcom's flagship offering and the product they most want large enterprises to buy. It bundles vSphere (compute hypervisor), vSAN (software-defined storage), NSX (network virtualisation and micro-segmentation), and the Aria Suite Enterprise for management and automation. VCF is priced at approximately $350 per physical core per year, and includes 1 TiB of vSAN storage capacity per licensed core.
VCF is the only offering that includes NSX — Broadcom's network virtualisation layer that underpins zero-trust micro-segmentation and east-west traffic control. Organisations that previously purchased NSX as a standalone product and now want to retain that capability have no option other than VCF. That constraint is not accidental. It is one of several mechanisms Broadcom uses to drive customers up the pricing ladder.
VCF subscriptions also come with Select Support, Broadcom's enhanced support tier with improved SLAs and proactive guidance. For large environments with complex stack dependencies, this may have genuine operational value — though the cost premium is substantial.
VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF)
VVF is positioned as the mid-tier option for organisations that need enterprise virtualisation and basic operations tooling but do not require network virtualisation. It includes vSphere Enterprise Plus (the hypervisor), vSAN (with 250 GiB of storage capacity per licensed core — one quarter the allocation of VCF), and Aria Suite Standard for monitoring and log analytics. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is included but limited to a single supervisor cluster.
VVF is priced at approximately $135 per physical core per year at list pricing, though enterprise negotiated rates can bring this into the $100–$120 range for large commitments. It represents the minimum viable bundle for customers who previously ran vSphere Enterprise Plus with vCenter and want equivalent functionality without the NSX layer.
The critical issue with VVF is that many customers are being forced into it from a much simpler licensing position — for example, organisations that previously ran vSphere Essentials Plus or standard vCenter Server SKUs. Those customers are not gaining meaningful new capabilities from the bundled Tanzu and Aria components; they are simply paying for capabilities they do not need and will not use.
vSphere Enterprise Plus
vSphere Enterprise Plus is a standalone subscription that provides the hypervisor and vCenter management without vSAN, NSX, or Aria tooling. It was added to the portfolio in Q4 2024 as a lower-cost option for organisations with external storage arrays or those running small-scale environments that had no need for hyper-converged infrastructure.
vSphere Enterprise Plus is priced below VVF but above vSphere Standard, and serves customers for whom the full VVF bundle represents genuine overspend. The challenge is that Broadcom actively discourages this tier during commercial negotiations, positioning VVF as the preferred entry point for any organisation with more than a handful of hosts.
vSphere Standard
vSphere Standard is the entry-level subscription, positioned at smaller or less demanding environments. It provides the core hypervisor and vCenter functionality without the enterprise-grade features of Enterprise Plus. In practice, most enterprise buyers are steered away from vSphere Standard during the sales process, with Broadcom sales teams framing the upgrade to VVF as a modest incremental cost rather than a substantial step change.
From our engagements: A UK-based retail group running VMware on 1,800 licensed cores was quoted VCF at $630,000 annually — a 5x increase over their prior support spend. Our portfolio analysis confirmed they required only vSphere and vCenter (VVF tier). We negotiated a VVF subscription at $243,000 annually with a 36-month price cap, saving $387,000 in year one alone. Broadcom also agreed to honour legacy support credit for months already paid.
Not sure which bundle maps to your current environment?
Our VMware licence analysts can map your existing estate against the new portfolio and identify the least-cost compliant path for renewal.What Was Discontinued: The 56 Killed Products
Understanding the new portfolio requires understanding what was removed. Broadcom cancelled approximately 56 standalone VMware products, eliminating the modular purchasing model that had allowed customers to buy precisely the capabilities they needed at the scale they required. The eliminated products include some of the most widely deployed components in the VMware ecosystem.
vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus Kit — both entry-level bundles targeted at small businesses — were discontinued, forcing small organisations into the full subscription model with its higher per-core minimums.
Standalone vSAN (Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise editions) was removed as a purchasable standalone product. Storage-only purchases are no longer possible; vSAN is now exclusively available as a component within VVF or VCF.
Standalone NSX was eliminated entirely from the standalone catalogue. NSX is now exclusively available within VCF, meaning any customer who needs network virtualisation must purchase the full VCF stack regardless of whether they use vSAN or Aria.
Horizon and Workspace ONE (both VDI and end-user computing) were not killed in the traditional sense — they were divested. Broadcom sold the entire Horizon and Workspace ONE product line to private equity firm KKR, which rebranded the business as Omnissa. Customers running Horizon VDI must now manage a vendor relationship with a newly independent company, with associated uncertainty around product roadmap, support quality, and long-term viability.
Aria Suite standalone SKUs — including individual Aria Operations, Aria Automation, Aria Network Insight, and Aria Log Insight licences — were all discontinued. These capabilities are now exclusively available as bundled components within VVF (Standard tier) or VCF (Enterprise tier).
Site Recovery Manager (standalone), Broadcom's disaster recovery orchestration product, was removed as a standalone offering. DR capabilities are now expected to be delivered through the broader VCF stack or through alternative third-party tools.
Carbon Black (Broadcom's endpoint security acquisition) was rebranded and repositioned separately from the VMware stack, creating further fragmentation for organisations that had integrated it with their virtualisation management workflows.
The Pricing Mechanics: Per-Core Licensing and the 16-Core Minimum
Beyond the product consolidation, Broadcom simultaneously changed the licensing metric from per-socket (CPU) to per-physical-core. This change has a compounding effect on cost that is easily underestimated during initial budget planning.
Under the old per-socket model, a server with two CPUs required two licences regardless of how many cores each CPU contained. A dual-socket server with two 8-core CPUs and a dual-socket server with two 32-core CPUs both required the same two VMware socket licences.
Under per-core licensing, the 32-core configuration requires 64 core licences — eight times more than the 8-core configuration, and four times the per-socket cost even at equivalent per-core pricing. Broadcom also introduced a 16-core minimum per CPU, meaning any CPU with fewer than 16 physical cores is still billed as though it has 16. Organisations running older servers with 8- or 12-core CPUs must pay for phantom cores they do not possess.
The net financial effect for organisations renewing from perpetual to subscription under the new model is a cost increase of 150% to 1,200% depending on their specific hardware configuration and which products they previously purchased. A UK university reported its annual VMware support and licencing cost increasing from £40,000 to £500,000 — an increase of more than 1,100% — after being migrated to a bundled VVF subscription. AT&T publicly reported receiving pricing proposals representing an increase of over 1,000% on its existing VMware spend.
Support costs have followed a similar trajectory. Organisations that previously paid modest annual support fees tied to their perpetual licence maintenance are now absorbing support costs embedded in subscription pricing that are typically three to five times higher than what they paid before.
The 72-Core Minimum: A Further Cost Escalation
In April 2025, Broadcom introduced an additional constraint: a 72-core minimum per order across new VCF and VVF commitments. This means that organisations with small footprints — even a handful of servers — must commit to licensing at least 72 cores regardless of their actual deployment. For organisations managing a small number of hosts for specific workloads, this represents a structural overspend that cannot be negotiated away without threatening to migrate.
Combined with the 16-core minimum per CPU, the per-core metric change, and the forced bundle upgrades, the 72-core floor creates a licensing architecture that systematically extracts higher revenue from smaller customers who historically spent least on VMware.
Migration Risks: What Organisations Are Discovering at Renewal
The most common shock at renewal comes not from the headline per-core pricing but from the interaction of three factors. First, the switch from perpetual to subscription eliminates the option to run on existing licences beyond the contract term. Organisations that previously held fully paid perpetual licences and chose not to renew support could continue operating indefinitely. Under subscription, non-renewal means the software goes dark.
Second, the 20% late-renewal penalty punishes any organisation that does not renew by its exact anniversary date. Given the complexity of these negotiations and the time required for proper commercial analysis, many organisations miss the date and absorb the penalty — which Broadcom enforces consistently.
Third, the term-length structure locks customers in for one, three, or five years without true-down provisions. If an organisation reduces its virtualised footprint during the subscription term — through cloud migration, application consolidation, or workload decommissioning — it continues to pay for the full original commitment. There is no mechanism to reduce mid-term without renegotiating the entire agreement, which typically requires extending the term.
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The coercive nature of Broadcom's new portfolio has accelerated evaluation of alternative platforms at a pace the market had not seen during VMware's independent years. Two alternatives are receiving the most serious enterprise consideration.
Nutanix (AHV)
Nutanix is the most direct functional alternative to the VMware stack for organisations running hyper-converged infrastructure. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) includes the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) as part of the subscription at no additional cost, eliminating the separate hypervisor licensing that VMware charges for. AHV is enterprise-grade, supports all major guest operating systems, and integrates directly with Nutanix's Prism management layer.
Migration from VMware to Nutanix is facilitated by Nutanix Move, a free migration tool that handles VM conversion and workload transfer. Organisations with existing Nutanix infrastructure running the VMware hypervisor can switch to AHV without replacing hardware. Gartner estimates that 35% of VMware workloads are expected to migrate to alternative platforms by 2028, with Nutanix capturing a disproportionate share of that movement.
The commercial model is fundamentally different: Nutanix licences per node rather than per core, which favours high-core-density modern hardware. Organisations with large core counts — the configurations most penalised by VMware's per-core metric — often find Nutanix pricing significantly more favourable on a like-for-like functional basis.
Azure VMware Solution (AVS)
For organisations with significant cloud investment or Azure commitment, Azure VMware Solution provides a consumption-based path that removes the perpetual capital expenditure of on-premises VMware infrastructure. AVS runs native VMware technology — vSphere, vSAN, and NSX — on dedicated Azure bare-metal infrastructure, meaning workloads can be migrated without re-platforming or re-architecting.
AVS pricing is based on a per-host consumption model, making it attractive for organisations that want to avoid multi-year subscription commitments and prefer operational expenditure over capital expenditure. It also integrates with existing Microsoft enterprise agreements, which may allow organisations with existing Azure commitments to fund AVS spend through their existing commercial relationship with Microsoft rather than establishing a separate commercial arrangement with Broadcom.
The limitation of AVS is cost at scale. For large, stable on-premises VMware environments where utilisation is predictable and consistently high, AVS consumption pricing can exceed the cost of an on-premises VCF subscription over a three-to-five year horizon. It is most attractive as a migration bridge rather than a permanent operational platform — unless a broader cloud migration strategy is in play.
Five Actions Before Your Next VMware Renewal
The VMware portfolio restructure has created a situation where passive renewal — simply accepting the terms Broadcom proposes — results in materially higher spend with no additional capability. Organisations that take a deliberate, structured approach to renewal can achieve significantly better outcomes.
First, conduct a complete core count audit of all licensed hosts before any commercial conversation. Understand exactly how many physical cores are in scope, identify any CPUs below the 16-core minimum threshold, and model the full cost of VCF versus VVF for your specific estate. Do this before Broadcom's team arrives with their numbers.
Second, assess whether all components of your assigned bundle are actually in use. If you are being pushed to VVF but have no current use case for vSAN, Tanzu, or Aria, document that clearly. Bundle over-entitlement is a legitimate commercial argument for tier negotiation or alternative pricing structures.
Third, initiate a formal evaluation of Nutanix AHV. Even if you ultimately stay with VMware, demonstrating that you have completed a competitive analysis and received Nutanix pricing creates genuine negotiating leverage with Broadcom's sales team. This evaluation should ideally begin twelve to eighteen months before your renewal date.
Fourth, verify your renewal anniversary date and build in sufficient lead time to complete negotiations before that date. The 20% late-renewal penalty is not waived in commercial negotiations — it is simply avoided by planning ahead. Organisations that start their commercial process fewer than six months before renewal are operating with compressed leverage and limited alternatives.
Fifth, negotiate for contract terms that protect your organisation beyond the initial pricing: true-down provisions, price cap clauses, auto-renewal opt-out rights, and audit protections. Broadcom's standard contract terms strongly favour the vendor. Most of these protections are achievable with sufficiently early engagement and appropriate leverage — but they require explicit negotiation.
Conclusion: The Portfolio Simplification Is a Revenue Strategy
Broadcom's reduction of the VMware product portfolio from 160+ SKUs to four bundles was not driven by a desire to simplify procurement for customers. It was designed to eliminate the optionality that allowed customers to contain VMware spend by purchasing only what they needed. The end of perpetual licences, the per-core metric shift, the 16-core minimum, and the 72-core floor all combine to increase the minimum cost of staying on VMware — regardless of what an organisation actually deploys or uses.
Understanding the new portfolio in precise detail is the starting point for any rational response. Organisations that know exactly what they have, what they need, and what alternatives exist are in a fundamentally stronger position at the negotiating table than those arriving at renewal without that preparation. The support cost increases of three to five times what customers previously paid are largely non-negotiable in isolation — but they can be offset through tier management, term structure, and the credible threat of migration.
The organisations achieving the best outcomes are those treating VMware renewal not as a procurement event but as a strategic commercial decision — one that deserves the same rigour as any major acquisition or divestiture.