After VMware acquisition, Broadcom has start to change VMware’s licensing tring to normalize and simplify it, but also tring to maximize the possible revenew. This not not so good for all customers.

Also some offering has been dismissed, like the Free vSphere Hypervisor or the basic VMware vSphere Essential bundle. And there was a force shift from a perpetual to subscription model.

Starting in November 2024, the VCF portfolio has some interesting news in term of licensing: to give VMware’s customers a more powerful and valuable enterprise-class HCI solution for running VMs and containers with IT infrastructure optimization, the amount of vSAN capacity included in VMware vSphere Foundation will be increasing by 2.5x to 250 GiB per core! Note that also the license cost will be slightly increased, so is a partial win.

VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) includes VMware’s ESXi hypervisor, VSAN storage, the vCenter virtual machine manager, the Tanzu container platform, and elements of the Aria management and automation suite. 

Maybe a move to avoid that people with VVF will consider moving to Nutanix, consindering also the recent news (Nutanix supports some vSAN Ready Nodes).

Another importan news, for customers who are focused on compute virtualization (that still is relevant), there are two options: VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and VMware vSphere Standard. Note that Enterprise Plus has been reintroduced again in VMware’s offering!

You can have a complete comparison between the different vSphere options in this PDF. Note that are all subscription based, and only VVF will include vSAN licenses (as described before).

The entire VCF portfolio is available to all end user customers through our distribution channel or directly from Broadcom.