VMware ESXi licensing in 2026. What each bundle includes and how cores are counted.

ESXi is now sold per physical core on subscription, with a 16 core floor per processor and two main bundles. Most overspend comes from buying VCF where vSphere Foundation fits and from paying the floor on older hosts.

Since Broadcom closed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023, ESXi has been sold per physical core, on subscription only, and in most cases inside a bundle: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or vSphere Foundation (VVF). It was the biggest change to VMware licensing in two decades, and it lands on every renewal.

This page sets out what each product line includes, how Broadcom counts cores, what happens to perpetual licenses and which contract terms to ask for. For the wider picture, see our Broadcom VMware knowledge hub, the Broadcom VMware advisory practice and the VMware negotiation playbook.

How is VMware ESXi licensed in 2026?

ESXi is licensed per physical core, on a subscription of one, three or five years, with a minimum of 16 cores per processor. You buy it inside VCF or vSphere Foundation, or for narrow cases as standalone vSphere Standard or vSphere Enterprise Plus. No new perpetual licenses are sold.

What ended when Broadcom took over?

Broadcom ended the sale of perpetual VMware licenses on December 11, 2023, and from February 2024 it no longer renewed support on perpetual licenses. Support contracts already in force run to their natural end date. After that, the license still works but Broadcom no longer supports it.

That support expiry is the forcing event for most customers. You can move to a Broadcom subscription, keep the perpetual licenses on third party support, or leave VMware. Each option is covered below.

How far did the product list shrink?

Broadcom cut the VMware price list from more than seventy products to two main bundles and a short list of standalone editions. VCF and vSphere Foundation carry almost all of the commercial weight now. Broadcom's VMware information page shows the current offers, and changes are announced on the Broadcom newsroom.

What does a VMware subscription include?

Every subscription combines the right to use the software with Broadcom support, and the two cannot be separated. You cannot take the license and decline support to save money.

Price protection comes with the longer terms. Broadcom will agree a cap on the renewal uplift for a three or five year commitment, but the cap only binds if it is written on the order form.

What does each VMware product include, and what does it cost per core?

VCF is the full private cloud stack and the most expensive per core; vSphere Foundation costs well under half as much and covers what most enterprises run. Broadcom publishes no public rate card, so the figures below are indicative list rates. Your quote will differ with term, size and negotiation.

What is inside VMware Cloud Foundation?

• vSphere Enterprise Plus. The full hypervisor with vCenter management.
• vSAN. Hyperconverged storage, with 1 TiB of capacity included for every licensed core.
• NSX. Software defined networking. Advanced security, including the vDefend firewall used for micro segmentation, is priced separately as an add on.
• VCF Operations and VCF Automation. The former Aria suite, renamed in version 9, for monitoring, automation and cost management.
• vSphere Kubernetes Service. The Kubernetes runtime on vSphere, formerly Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

For hyperconverged environments that use the storage and networking, VCF costs less per core than buying the parts separately. The catch is scope: you pay for NSX and automation on every core whether or not you deploy them. Broadcom's VCF product page lists the current components, and our VCF pricing guide covers the discount bands.

What is inside vSphere Foundation?

• vSphere Enterprise Plus with vCenter Standard. The same hypervisor feature set as VCF.
• vSphere Kubernetes Service. Included, as in VCF.
• VCF Operations. Monitoring, logs and diagnostics, with a narrower scope than the VCF version.
• vSAN. A smaller capacity entitlement per core, with more available as paid vSAN add on capacity.

Two points often get missed. VCF Automation (formerly Aria Automation) is not part of vSphere Foundation, and early descriptions of the bundle quoted 100 GB of vSAN per core, which Broadcom's current counting guidance puts at 0.25 TiB. Our VCF and vSphere Foundation comparison goes feature by feature.

vSphere Foundation fits most enterprises that do not run vSAN at scale or NSX in production. Confirm it can be ordered in your region before you plan on it: Broadcom has said product availability varies by region, and in late 2025 it withdrew vSphere Foundation in parts of EMEA.

Where do vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus still fit?

• vSphere Standard. No DRS, no vSAN entitlement and no operations tooling. It suits remote and branch offices with a few small hosts.
• vSphere Enterprise Plus. The full hypervisor without the bundle, for organizations that already run their own automation and monitoring tools.

Both editions stop at vSphere 8 Update 3. Broadcom's product line comparison, linked from the vSphere product pages, keeps vSphere 9 features for vSphere Foundation and VCF, and general support for vSphere 8 ends on October 11, 2027. A three year standalone subscription signed this year outlives that date, so ask in writing what Broadcom will offer then.

Broadcom executives said at VMware Explore in September 2026 that a refreshed vSphere Standard for smaller environments is planned. Until a version 9 Standard SKU appears on a quote, budget on the version 8 limits and do not sign on the strength of a roadmap slide.

Is free ESXi still available?

Yes, in a limited form. Broadcom withdrew the free vSphere Hypervisor in 2024, then released ESXi 8.0 Update 3e as a free download in 2025. Knowledge base article 399823 lists the limits: no Broadcom support, no vCenter management, no vMotion, DRS or HA, and no backups that use the vSphere storage APIs.

The free edition also caps a host at 2 physical processors and a virtual machine at 8 vCPUs. That is enough for a lab or a single standalone box, but it cannot run managed production clusters, and Broadcom states that version 9 is available only with VCF and vSphere Foundation.

How do you count cores for ESXi licensing?

Count every physical core on every host that runs ESXi, with a floor of 16 cores per processor. A processor with fewer than 16 cores is billed as 16, and one with more is billed at its actual count. The minimum applies per processor, so two small processors in one server cannot share a single 16 core minimum.

How does the 16 core minimum change the bill?

A server with two 8 core processors needs 32 core licenses, even though it has 16 cores. A 32 core processor needs 32. On older low core servers the floor inflates the bill, and on modern processors you pay for every core, so rising core counts per socket push each renewal up.

The first two rows cost the same. A host with half the cores pays for a standard 32 core dual processor configuration because of the floor, which is why old hardware is expensive to keep on VMware.

How do you check your own core count?

Broadcom publishes a PowerCLI module, FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage.psm1, in knowledge base article 313548. It connects to vCenter and reports the licensed cores per host and the vSAN capacity you need. It requires PowerCLI 13.3 or later and PowerShell 7.4.6 or later.

Run it yourself before the renewal quote arrives, and reconcile the output against your hardware asset register. The KB warns that cores disabled in the BIOS can make the results inaccurate, so treat disabled cores as licensable unless Broadcom confirms otherwise in writing. Product documentation sits on VMware's technical documentation site.

Worked example: what does a hardware refresh do to the count?

Say you run 20 hosts, each with two 12 core processors. That is 480 physical cores, but the floor bills 640. At the one year VCF list rate, the 160 cores you do not have cost $56,000 a year.

Time a consolidation like this before the renewal count is taken, because a subscription is committed for its term and cutting cores midway is not a standard right. Check storage too, since fewer licensed cores can push you into paid vSAN add on capacity. Our guide to per core calculation pitfalls covers more edge cases.

Should you buy VCF or vSphere Foundation?

Buy VCF if you will run NSX or VCF Automation in production, or need far more vSAN capacity than vSphere Foundation includes. Otherwise vSphere Foundation, or a standalone edition where version 8 is enough, usually costs far less for the same hypervisor. Decide cluster by cluster against what is actually deployed.

• NSX. Is it carrying production traffic today, or only installed in a lab?
• Automation. Do teams use a self service catalog built on VCF Automation, or provision through other tools?
• Storage. Compare the vSAN TiB you consume with 0.25 TiB times your licensed cores, and price the add on capacity for the gap.
• Version. If you need vSphere 9 in the next three years, the standalone editions drop out.

Why we reject the claim that VCF is the only sensible path

Broadcom account teams tell customers that VCF is the only sensible path and that perpetual licenses are dead. We disagree with both. In roughly 7 of 10 environments we rebuilt, the customer needed vSphere and vSAN only, and was paying for NSX and Aria capacity that never reached production.

Price vSphere Foundation and the standalone editions against VCF on your real core count. Then bring a documented third party support quote and a migration plan to the negotiation. Together they change the renewal number more than any discount request.

How does the answer change with company size?

The bundle gap is $215 per licensed core a year at one year list, so it scales with the host count. Say you run three dual processor hosts at the 32 core floor: 96 licensed cores put the gap at $20,640 a year, and vSphere Standard may cover branch sites. At 1,000 licensed cores the gap is $215,000 a year.

Large customers get the hardest push toward VCF, and they have the most room to shift part of the workload elsewhere. A credible plan for even one or two clusters carries weight. Comparisons such as Hyper-V against VMware and the Nutanix migration cost model help size that plan.

What happens to perpetual ESXi licenses now?

Perpetual licenses keep working after support ends, but you lose Broadcom support and most updates. Broadcom KB 429208 confirms that hosts and vCenter keep running and licensed features stay available. You cannot open support requests, download routine patches or perform major version upgrades.

There is one exception. Under KB 314603, Broadcom provides patches for vSphere 8.x vulnerabilities rated CVSS 9.0 or higher to all perpetual customers, including those whose support has expired. Lower rated fixes, and fixes for older versions, are not covered.

When does third party support make sense?

Independent support providers maintain VMware perpetual licenses after Broadcom support ends. They employ their own VMware engineers, run their own support desk and supply security fixes outside Broadcom's channel. In practice this extends the life of a perpetual license by three to five years.

Use it as a bridge to a planned end state, either a migration off VMware or a subscription on your schedule. A written quote also helps in the Broadcom negotiation, because it shows you are not forced to sign.

What are the migration paths off perpetual VMware?

1. Broadcom subscription. Move the workload onto VCF or vSphere Foundation. This is the simplest path.
2. Third party support. Keep the perpetual licenses under independent support while you prepare a different end state.
3. Alternative hypervisor. Move to Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V or Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.
4. Public cloud. Move to a public cloud provider. VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution and Google Cloud VMware Engine keep VMware tooling in the cloud.
5. Containers. Move workloads off virtual machines onto Kubernetes, through vSphere Kubernetes Service or a Kubernetes platform on other infrastructure.

Our VCF migration cost estimator compares the subscription with at least one alternative hypervisor on your own numbers.

What have we seen in recent VMware renewals?

Across roughly 30 to 40 Broadcom and VMware renewals we benchmarked in 2024 and 2025, the switch to subscription raised committed annual cost sharply. First renewal quotes landed at 2 to 3 times the customer's prior perpetual support spend, and three patterns came up again and again.

• High opening quotes. First quotes ran 100 to 220 percent above the expiring perpetual support line on the same core count.
• Unused bundle content. Putting vSphere inside VCF left 30 to 60 percent of buyers paying for capacity they did not deploy.
• Exit plans pay. Buyers who modeled a credible exit to another hypervisor recovered 15 to 30 percent off the opening quote.

In one renewal, perpetual support had run out in 2024 and the subscription quote came in at three times the old support spend. Our review showed vSphere Foundation fit the workload better than VCF. The customer carved out vSAN, capped the multi year uplift and documented its migration options, and the contract landed 42 percent below Broadcom's original quote.

On dense dual socket hosts, most of the VMware cost surprise comes from how many cores are counted, before any discount is discussed.

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

Broadcom sales teams work from a consistent set of positions. These are the lines we hear most often, with the replies that keep the discussion on your numbers.

• "VCF is the standard platform for customers like you." Ask for a vSphere Foundation quote on the same core count, and compare it line by line with the VCF quote.
• "Our records show your core count." Hand over your own FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage.psm1 output, host by host, and ask Broadcom to reconcile any difference before it prices anything.
• "This discount expires at quarter end." A one time discount is worth less than a written cap on future uplifts. Ask for the cap on the order form and let the deadline pass if you must.
• "Perpetual licenses have no future." Point out that your licenses keep running, that vSphere 8 patches rated CVSS 9.0 or higher still arrive under KB 314603, and put your third party support quote on the table.
• "The extra components are included at no cost." They are priced into the per core rate. Ask for vSphere Foundation plus the vSAN add on capacity you need, priced separately.

Which contract terms should you ask for in a VMware subscription?

Ask for terms that fix the price, the count and your options at the next renewal. Each needs to sit on the order form or in the contract, since sales emails do not bind Broadcom.

• Uplift cap. A stated maximum percentage increase on the per core price at renewal, so year four is not priced from scratch.
• Core count definition. Physical cores as counted on a stated date, with retired hosts excluded, so later audits start from an agreed baseline.
• Hardware swap right. The right to replace hosts during the term at no charge while total licensed cores stay flat.
• Bundle step down. The right to move from VCF to vSphere Foundation at renewal without losing the discount level.
• vSAN add on price. A fixed per TiB price for extra capacity for the whole term.
• Version and region. Written confirmation that you may keep running vSphere 8 while you plan the upgrade, and that your chosen bundle stays orderable in your region.

Once signed, reconcile the core count every quarter, review which bundle components are in use and rerun the alternative hypervisor test before the next renewal, so the next quote starts from your figures.

What to do next

1. This month. Inventory every ESXi host with its physical core count and current license state, using Broadcom's counting module.
2. Before the quote. Reconcile the licensed core count against the production host inventory and your hardware register.
3. Bundle comparison. Price VCF, vSphere Foundation and standalone vSphere Enterprise Plus against the components each cluster actually uses.
4. Alternatives. Run the migration cost estimator against at least one alternative hypervisor, and get an independent third party support quote for the perpetual licenses.
5. Negotiation. Put the multi year uplift cap, the core count definition and the step down right on the order form.
6. Next renewal. Document a migration timeline so you still have options when this term ends.
7. Get help. Talk to our Broadcom VMware advisory practice through the contact page, or cover every renewal with Vendor Shield.

Frequently asked questions