The VMware price increase in 2026, from Broadcom's reset to the yearly uplift. What buyers paid and what cut it.

Moving from perpetual VMware licenses to Broadcom's bundles typically more than doubles annual cost at transition. A smaller yearly uplift then compounds on that new base, so the reset and the uplift need to be negotiated as two separate prices.

How much have VMware prices increased under Broadcom?

For customers moving from perpetual licenses to the new subscription bundles, the first transition quote commonly resets annual cost by 100 to 250 percent before any negotiation. That makes it the steepest price increase we tracked across any enterprise software vendor in 2026.

The public outliers run into four figure percentages. One large carrier disclosed a Broadcom quote it described as a 1,050 percent increase. They are not the median, and the gap between them and the median shows how much room there is to negotiate.

How should you measure your own increase?

Compare fully loaded annual cost before and after, for the same capacity. Your finance team and the board will ask for this number, and it is the one Broadcom finds hardest to argue with.

• Include perpetual amortization. The yearly write down of the licenses you bought outright is part of what VMware cost you.
• Include maintenance. Support and subscription payments on the perpetual licenses, at the last invoiced rate.
• Include add ons. vSAN, NSX, Aria and any other VMware products the new bundle now covers.
• Exclude one time migration costs. They belong in the exit scenario, and mixing them in blurs the comparison.

Compared against the support line alone, the increase looks larger than it is. Compared against fully loaded cost, it is still large, and it becomes a number you can present internally without having it picked apart.

What happened to the VMware product catalog under Broadcom?

Broadcom collapsed a catalog of more than 8,000 SKUs into a short list of bundles. VMware Cloud Foundation is the per core flagship, vSphere Foundation covers mid sized environments, and a short tail of vSphere editions sits below them.

vSphere Standard was discontinued as a standalone perpetual product, which pushes smaller environments into richer bundles than they need. The entry point now sits higher than it did in the old per socket perpetual world. Simpler selling and larger deal sizes were the purpose of the change.

Why do smaller environments end up in bigger bundles?

With the standalone perpetual tiers gone, the default quote lands a tier higher. Broadcom's current product comparison also states that vSphere Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus are available only in versions up to vSphere 8 Update 3. vSphere 9 features ship only in vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation.

That matters for timing. General support for vSphere 8 runs to October 2027, so a customer buying Standard or Enterprise Plus today is buying a version with a known end date. Expect the account team to raise that point in any conversation about staying on a lower tier.

How does the sixteen core minimum change the count?

Broadcom licenses at least 16 physical cores for every CPU, even when the processor has fewer. A two socket host with eight core processors has 16 physical cores and is billed for 32, double its physical count. Our core licensing guide shows how the floor applies host by host.

What is the difference between the VMware reset and the annual uplift?

They are two separate prices that a quote blends together. The reset is the one time gap between your old perpetual plus maintenance cost and the new subscription for the same capacity. The uplift is a smaller recurring increase, in the high single digits to low teens, applied to the reset base every year after.

Buyers who treat them as one number negotiate the wrong one. You fight the reset once, at transition. The uplift is decided by a clause, and that clause stays in force long after the people who negotiated it have moved on.

What does the price index show from 2022 to 2026?

We index the annual cost of a typical VMware environment at 100 in 2022, before the acquisition closed.

Each uplift is modest on its own. The cost comes from applying it to a base that has already more than doubled, and the gap widens every year the contract has no cap.

The two renewals after the reset added 32 index points, close to a third of the entire 2022 cost. With no path back to perpetual licensing, those are the terms you compound on.

A worked example: what a cap is worth over five years

Say a hypothetical company has a fully loaded VMware cost of $400,000 a year. Broadcom opens at a 150 percent reset, or $1,000,000. Decomposition takes 25 percent off, to $750,000, and a funded migration assessment takes a further 10 percent, to $675,000.

The signed increase is $275,000 against an opening increase of $600,000, about 46 percent of the first ask. Now compare two contracts on that $675,000 base: one with a 10 percent annual uplift and one capped at 4 percent.

The cap is worth $464,925 over five years in this example, and by year five the uncapped contract costs $198,613 more every year. The 4 percent figure is for illustration only. What matters is that a number is written into the contract at all.

Which negotiation steps cut the VMware quote the most?

Three steps paid, in this order: decomposing the bundle and reviewing the sixteen core minimum, funding a migration assessment, and capping the uplift. The first two lower the reset. The third decides every year after it.

Decompose the bundle against what you actually run

Map every cluster to the components it uses before you accept any tier. First quotes often price the flagship where the deployment justified the tier below, for example VMware Cloud Foundation on clusters that run no NSX and use external storage instead of vSAN.

Then review every host against the sixteen core floor. Together, these two reviews cut the first quote by 25 to 45 percent in most cases we saw, the largest single reduction in our data. Our VCF and vSphere Foundation comparison covers the feature split cluster by cluster.

Price the exit with a funded migration assessment

The realistic alternatives are Nutanix, Microsoft Hyper-V, Proxmox and public cloud. At enterprise scale their break even typically sits 9 to 14 months out. A payback inside two budget years is one a CFO will fund, and Broadcom's account teams know those numbers too.

An assessment run in parallel with the renewal was worth a further 10 to 20 percent off the quote, plus the multi year cap. The platform comparisons are in our Hyper-V analysis, the Nutanix cost comparison and the Proxmox comparison.

Why we fund a migration study even when you plan to stay

The usual advice is to skip a migration study unless you are serious about leaving, because it costs money and Broadcom will assume you are bluffing. We disagree. In our transitions, the assessment is what turned Nutanix or Hyper-V from a talking point into a priced scenario the account team had to answer.

Customers who skipped it made counteroffers with nothing behind them. Fund a scoped study of the workloads that could leave first, share its conclusions with Broadcom, and keep the detailed numbers for the negotiation itself.

Cap the uplift in writing

The cap comes third in value at signature and first in value over time. Ask for a stated maximum uplift for each renewal year, applied to the per core rate. Our guide to price cap negotiation covers the wording in detail.

Our perpetual endgame analysis covers the strategy behind the pricing. It sets out the acquisition arithmetic and the pattern Broadcom followed after buying CA Technologies and Symantec's enterprise business. The four options for customers who still hold perpetual licenses are set out in the perpetual options guide.

What have we seen in Broadcom VMware transitions in 2024 and 2025?

Across roughly 35 to 50 Broadcom VMware transitions we benchmarked between 2024 and 2025, the first subscription quote and the number the customer eventually signed were rarely close.

• Prepared buyers kept most of the gap. They held the realized increase to roughly 40 to 60 percent of the increase in the opening ask, and they also won the multi year caps that decide every later year.
• Tier choice drove the first cut. Where the quote priced VMware Cloud Foundation across the board, mapping clusters to what they ran produced the largest reduction.
• The assessment separated outcomes. Customers with a costed alternative settled closer to their own number than those who arrived without one.

You negotiate the reset once, but you pay whatever the uplift clause says every year you run VMware.

For more detail on how far final prices land from first quotes, see our quote to final price benchmark. Per core list and discount bands for 2026 are in the VCF pricing guide.

What will the Broadcom account team say, and how should you answer?

Expect the same handful of lines in most transitions. Each has a precise answer that keeps the conversation on your numbers.

Quarter end pressure is real, and it can work for you once your terms are ready. Our note on Broadcom fiscal quarter timing explains when discounts tend to move.

Which contract terms should you ask Broadcom for?

Ask for terms that protect the years after signature, because the reset discount is spent the day you sign. These are requests to make. Broadcom does not grant them by default, and the funded assessment is what gives them weight.

• Renewal uplift cap. A maximum percentage for each renewal, applied to the per core rate, so the reset base cannot compound unchecked.
• Price hold on added cores. Growth cores at the same per core rate for the full term, so expansion does not reopen pricing.
• Tier mix by cluster. The right to license some clusters as vSphere Foundation and others as VMware Cloud Foundation, and to move a cluster down a tier at renewal.
• Reduction at renewal. The right to drop cores for retired hosts without the remaining cores being repriced.
• Agreed core count as an exhibit. Your host inventory attached to the order, so any later compliance review starts from a number both sides signed.
• Payment schedule. Annual invoicing on a multi year term, or a discount that reflects the cash you pay up front.

How do you check your own VMware position before the quote arrives?

Build your own count from vCenter before Broadcom builds one for you. Three sources cover most of it.

1. RVTools. The vHost tab lists sockets and cores per CPU for every host, which shows where the sixteen core floor adds billed cores.
2. Broadcom's License Counting PowerCLI tool. Described in Broadcom knowledge base article 313548, it connects to vCenter and applies the per CPU minimum. It needs PowerCLI 13.3 or later and PowerShell 7.4.6 or later.
3. Your component inventory. List which clusters run NSX, which use vSAN datastores, and which use Aria or VCF Operations. That list is what the decomposition review works from.

When should you start preparing for a VMware renewal?

What to do next

1. Build the baseline. Calculate fully loaded annual cost before and after, with amortization and maintenance in and migration costs out.
2. Count cores yourself. Run RVTools or the Broadcom counting tool and flag every host below sixteen cores per CPU.
3. Decompose the bundle. Map each cluster to the components it runs and ask for a quote at the tier each one justifies.
4. Fund the migration assessment. Start it in parallel with the renewal, even if you expect to stay.
5. Negotiate the reset and the uplift separately. Settle the reset once, then get the uplift cap written into the contract.
6. Get independent help if you need it. Our Broadcom practice runs the transition with you, from core count to signed cap.

Frequently asked questions