Broadcom Simplified VMware Product Portfolio: What's Included and What's Missing

From 160+ Products to Four Bundles: A New VMware Landscape

Broadcom's acquisition of VMware in late 2023 resulted in a radical simplification of VMware's product offerings. Over 160 individual VMware products and bundles have been consolidated into four main subscriptions: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere Foundation (VVF), vSphere Standard, and vSphere Enterprise Plus.

This streamlined lineup folds formerly standalone products — including vSAN (software-defined storage), NSX (network virtualisation and security), and the Aria management suite (formerly vRealize) — into broader bundles. While the new bundles aim to reduce complexity and deliver a one-stop private cloud stack, they also limit flexibility, forcing some customers to purchase features they may not need and potentially increasing costs — especially for smaller deployments that previously relied on entry-level offerings like vSphere Essentials Plus.

The consolidation represents a fundamental shift in how enterprises procure VMware technology. The era of à la carte purchasing — selecting individual products and editions to match specific requirements — is over. In its place, Broadcom has imposed a pre-defined bundle model where customers choose one of four packages that determine which capabilities are available. Understanding exactly what each bundle includes, what has been discontinued, and how this affects your organisation's VMware costs and strategy is essential for IT, procurement, and finance leaders navigating this transition.

Inside the Bundles: What Each Package Includes

Each of the four bundles packages specific VMware components at different capability levels. Former standalone products — vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and vRealize/Aria — are now delivered as part of these bundles or not at all. The following comparison breaks down exactly what is included in each bundle and what is missing.

The table reveals a clear hierarchy. VMware Cloud Foundation is the all-inclusive private cloud platform — the only bundle that includes NSX, the full Aria suite, HCX migration tools, and SDDC Manager. It is also the most expensive, priced for large enterprises building complete software-defined data centres. vSphere Foundation sits in the middle — including vSAN and basic Aria monitoring but lacking NSX and the full management suite. vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSphere Standard are stripped-down virtualisation-only offerings that include no software-defined storage, networking, or management tools.

Mapping Your Current VMware Products to the New Bundles

Former Standalone Products: What Happened to vSAN, NSX, and Aria

A major consequence of Broadcom's bundling strategy is that many standalone VMware products are no longer sold separately. Key data centre components that were previously available as individual purchases have been absorbed into the bundle hierarchy — or eliminated entirely.

vSAN — Absorbed into VCF and VVF

VMware vSAN, the software-defined storage platform, can no longer be purchased independently. It is included in VMware Cloud Foundation (with ~1 TiB per core) and vSphere Foundation (with ~250 GiB per core). Customers who previously purchased vSAN licences separately must now adopt one of these bundles to continue using vSAN with current updates and support. Additional vSAN capacity beyond the bundled allocation requires purchasing add-on subscriptions at additional cost.

NSX — Available Only in VCF (or as Firewall Add-On)

VMware NSX, the network virtualisation and micro-segmentation platform, is included only in VMware Cloud Foundation. It is not available in vSphere Foundation, vSphere Enterprise Plus, or vSphere Standard. Customers who need NSX capabilities without the full VCF stack can purchase the "VMware Firewall with Advanced Threat Protection" add-on — Broadcom's repackaged approach to selling NSX functionality — but this comes at additional cost and does not include all NSX features available in VCF.

Aria Suite — Folded into Bundles, No Standalone Sales

The VMware Aria suite (formerly vRealize) — covering operations monitoring, automation, log analytics, and cloud management — is no longer sold as a standalone product. The full Aria Suite Enterprise is included only in VMware Cloud Foundation. A limited subset (Aria Operations Standard for monitoring) is included in vSphere Foundation. Customers who previously licensed vRealize/Aria components independently will find that their existing deployments enter maintenance mode — no new features, security patches only — when current support terms expire. Any expansion or renewal requires moving to one of the new bundles.

What the Bundle Model Means for Existing Customers

For organisations currently running VMware, the transition to Broadcom's bundle model creates several distinct scenarios depending on the existing VMware footprint. Understanding which scenario applies to your organisation is essential for planning the transition and quantifying the financial impact.

Scenario 1: vSphere-Only Customers

Organisations that use VMware purely for virtualisation — vSphere hypervisor and vCenter for VM management, without vSAN, NSX, or Aria — have the most straightforward transition. They choose between vSphere Standard (if they only need basic virtualisation) or vSphere Enterprise Plus (if they require DRS, FT, distributed virtual switch, and other advanced features). The cost impact depends primarily on the shift from per-socket to per-core pricing and the move from perpetual licensing to subscription. For environments with modern high-core-count processors, the per-core pricing alone can represent a 2–4× cost increase compared to the old per-socket model.

Scenario 2: vSphere + vSAN Customers

Organisations that use both vSphere and vSAN must adopt vSphere Foundation (VVF) at minimum — the only bundle below Cloud Foundation that includes vSAN. This means they also receive Aria Operations Standard and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, whether they need them or not. The bundled vSAN allocation (~250 GiB per core) may be insufficient for storage-intensive workloads, requiring additional vSAN capacity add-ons at extra cost. The total cost impact combines the per-core pricing increase, the subscription model shift, and any additional vSAN capacity purchases — often resulting in a significant overall increase compared to the previous individual licence model.

Scenario 3: Full Stack Customers (vSphere + vSAN + NSX + Aria)

Organisations that previously used VMware's complete software-defined data centre stack — vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and the full vRealize/Aria suite — are directed to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). For these customers, the bundling may actually represent reasonable value, since VCF includes all the capabilities they were previously licensing separately. The per-core pricing change still applies, but the consolidation of multiple separate licences into a single bundle can offset some of the per-unit increase. These customers should focus negotiation efforts on volume discounts, multi-year terms, and trade-in credits for their existing perpetual licences.

Scenario 4: Hybrid or Partial Adopters

The most challenging scenario is organisations that use some but not all of a bundle's capabilities — for example, vSphere + NSX but not vSAN, or vSphere + vSAN + Aria but not NSX. These organisations are forced into a bundle that includes capabilities they don't need, with no ability to opt out of those components or receive a corresponding price reduction. The only recourse is negotiation: demonstrating to Broadcom that the bundled capabilities don't align with the organisation's requirements and requesting pricing that reflects actual usage rather than theoretical feature access.

Impact on Small Customers: The End of Essentials Plus

Broadcom's portfolio consolidation has a disproportionate impact on small and mid-sized customers. The retirement of vSphere Essentials Plus Kit — VMware's most popular entry-level offering — eliminates the cost-effective path that small organisations used to access enterprise virtualisation.

Under VMware's pre-acquisition model, a small manufacturer running three ESXi hosts could purchase vSphere Essentials Plus for a modest annual fee, gaining access to vSphere, vCenter Essentials, and basic high-availability features. This kit was designed specifically for small environments and priced accordingly. Under Broadcom's new model, the closest equivalent is vSphere Enterprise Plus subscription — which includes far more features than most small organisations need (DRS, FT, distributed virtual switch) and comes with a significantly higher price tag. Additionally, the per-core licensing model with a 16-core minimum per CPU means that even small servers with modest core counts pay for at least 16 cores of licensing.

The result: small customers who previously spent a few thousand dollars annually on VMware now face subscription costs that may be 2–5× higher — for capabilities they will never use. This cost increase has driven many small organisations to evaluate alternatives including Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM-based platforms, and Nutanix AHV — platforms that offer basic virtualisation without the bundle overhead. For organisations committed to VMware, the key is to engage Broadcom early to explore any transition programmes, trade-in credits, or volume discounts that may partially offset the increase.

The Cost of Bundling: Flexibility vs. Feature Overload

Broadcom's forced bundling approach creates a fundamental trade-off between delivered value and actual need. Every customer gets a richer feature set than they may have previously purchased — but many will pay for capabilities they have no intention of deploying.

Consider a mid-sized SaaS company that previously used vSphere Standard and vSAN to run its backend infrastructure. Under the old model, they paid for exactly what they needed. Under Broadcom's new lineup, obtaining vSAN requires adopting vSphere Foundation — which also includes Aria Operations (they use Datadog), Tanzu Kubernetes (they run containers in AWS), and vSphere Enterprise Plus features (they don't use DRS or FT). The immediate result is a higher subscription cost for a bundle where three of four additional capabilities provide no value.

For larger enterprises, the equation may be more favourable. An organisation building a greenfield private cloud that needs compute, storage, networking, management, and Kubernetes may find VMware Cloud Foundation to be a well-integrated, competitively priced stack compared to purchasing each component separately (which is no longer possible anyway). The challenge is that most organisations don't fall neatly into VCF's "complete SDDC" use case — they have hybrid environments where only some of the bundled capabilities are relevant.

Quantifying the Bundling Tax

The financial impact of forced bundling varies dramatically by customer profile, but the pattern is consistent: organisations pay more for capabilities they don't use. To quantify this, organisations should calculate what Redress calls the "bundling tax" — the percentage of your subscription cost attributable to capabilities you have no plans to deploy. For a vSphere + vSAN customer forced into VVF, the bundling tax includes Aria Operations, Tanzu, and advanced vSphere features beyond what they previously licensed. For a vSphere-only customer forced into Enterprise Plus, the tax includes DRS, FT, and distributed switch capabilities they may never configure. Across Redress's Broadcom advisory engagements, bundling taxes typically range from 15–40% of the total subscription cost — significant overhead that can be partially mitigated through negotiation but never fully eliminated under the current bundle structure.

The per-core pricing model compounds this effect. Under VMware's legacy per-socket model, a two-socket server required exactly two licences regardless of core count. Under Broadcom's per-core model with a 16-core minimum, the same server with two 64-core AMD EPYC processors requires 128 core licences — a 64× increase in licence units. While the per-core price is lower than the per-socket price, the total cost for high-core-count environments is substantially higher. Organisations running modern AMD EPYC or Intel Xeon Scalable processors with 32+ cores per socket are most severely affected. Those running older hardware with lower core counts may see modest increases — but face the paradox of needing to upgrade hardware for performance while knowing that each hardware upgrade also increases VMware licensing costs.

Evaluating Alternatives: When It Makes Strategic Sense

Broadcom's pricing changes have made platform alternatives evaluation a mainstream activity rather than a fringe exercise. Organisations that would never have considered leaving VMware are now running serious evaluations of Proxmox VE, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and KVM-based platforms — not because these alternatives are superior to VMware, but because the cost differential has become large enough to justify the migration effort and operational risk.

The practical approach is workload segmentation. Rather than attempting a wholesale VMware replacement (which carries significant risk for mission-critical workloads), organisations identify workload tiers: Tier 1 (mission-critical, VMware-dependent features like DRS, HA, FT — remain on VMware), Tier 2 (important but not VMware-dependent — candidates for Hyper-V or Nutanix), and Tier 3 (development, test, non-production — candidates for Proxmox or KVM). By migrating Tier 2 and Tier 3 workloads off VMware, organisations reduce their VMware core count and subscription costs while maintaining VMware for the workloads that genuinely require its capabilities. A 20–30% reduction in VMware core count through selective migration can offset a significant portion of the Broadcom price increase.

Recommendations for IT, Procurement, and Finance Leaders

Negotiation Leverage in the New Broadcom Reality

Despite the reduced flexibility in product selection, subscription pricing remains highly negotiable — particularly for large enterprises with significant VMware footprints. Broadcom's published list prices are starting points, and organisations that negotiate effectively consistently achieve better outcomes than those who accept initial quotes.

The strongest negotiation levers include: competitive alternatives credibility — demonstrating that you have actively evaluated Proxmox, Hyper-V, or Nutanix and have a realistic migration plan creates genuine competitive pressure that Broadcom's sales teams take seriously; multi-year commitment potential — offering a 3-year or 5-year commitment in exchange for significant per-core discounts locks in pricing predictability while giving Broadcom revenue visibility; total account value — organisations that also purchase other Broadcom products (CA Technologies, Symantec, semiconductor tools) can negotiate across the entire Broadcom relationship rather than on VMware alone; and renewal timing — Broadcom's sales organisation operates on quarterly targets, and renewals or new commitments near quarter-end carry stronger negotiation dynamics than mid-quarter discussions.

Organisations should also be aware that Broadcom has, in some cases, offered custom pricing arrangements for customers whose workload profiles don't align well with the standard bundles — particularly when the alternative is the customer migrating significant workloads to competing platforms. These custom arrangements are not advertised and require direct negotiation, typically supported by detailed usage data demonstrating the misalignment between the bundle's capabilities and the organisation's actual requirements.

"Broadcom's bundling strategy is designed to drive higher average revenue per customer — and it works. The customers who fare best in this transition are those who understand exactly what they're paying for, extract maximum value from bundled capabilities, negotiate aggressively on pricing, and right-size their VMware footprint by migrating non-strategic workloads to alternatives. The customers who fare worst are those who accept list pricing without negotiation, don't audit their actual usage, and continue paying for VMware across their entire estate without evaluating alternatives."

— Fredrik Filipsson, Co-Founder, Redress Compliance