VMware vSphere Foundation Licensing Guide 2026What’s Included, What It Costs, and When to Choose VVF Over VCF

Where VVF Fits in the VMware Product Hierarchy

Understanding VVF requires understanding where it sits in Broadcom’s simplified VMware product structure. Since the 2023 acquisition, Broadcom has consolidated VMware’s approximately 8,000 individual SKUs into a tiered hierarchy of bundled subscriptions. For on-premises virtualisation, the hierarchy is now:

The critical positioning insight: VVF is the only sub-$350 VMware product that provides access to vSphere 9.0. Standalone vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus remain available but are permanently capped at version 8 Update 3. No new vSphere 9.0 features, security patches specific to the v9 branch, or architectural improvements (such as vSAN ESA enhancements) will be available through standalone vSphere. For organisations that need to stay current on VMware’s latest platform releases, the choice is VVF or VCF — there is no other path to vSphere 9.

This is not an accident. Broadcom has designed the product hierarchy to create an upgrade pressure gradient: standalone vSphere customers are steered toward VVF for version currency, and VVF customers are steered toward VCF for capabilities (NSX, SDDC Manager, larger vSAN entitlement) that VVF deliberately excludes. Understanding this dynamic is essential for making a licensing decision that serves your organisation’s needs rather than Broadcom’s revenue targets.

VVF 9.0: Exactly What Is Included

VVF 9.0 is a bundled subscription that packages several VMware products into a single per-core licence. Here is what you receive — and, equally important, what you do not.

Included in VVF

Not Included in VVF (VCF-Only Capabilities)

Pricing and Core Count Mechanics

VVF uses the same per-core licensing model as VCF, with identical counting rules. The list price is approximately $135 per physical core per year, representing a 61% discount versus VCF’s $350/core. All pricing is for subscription licences that include support and updates for the duration of the term.

Core Counting Rules (Identical to VCF)

The licensing mechanics for VVF mirror VCF exactly. You license every physical core on every ESXi host running VVF, subject to these rules:

16-core minimum per CPU. Each physical processor must be licensed for at least 16 cores, even if it has fewer. An 8-core CPU costs 16 core licences; a 12-core CPU costs 16 core licences; a 24-core CPU costs 24 core licences. Only CPUs with 16 or more physical cores are licensed at their actual count.

BIOS-disabled cores count. Physical cores disabled via BIOS settings are still included in the licensable count. There is no mechanism to reduce core count through BIOS configuration.

Count physical cores, not threads. Hyper-Threading (Intel) or SMT (AMD) do not create additional licensable cores. A 32-core CPU with 64 threads requires 32 VVF core licences.

72-core minimum order. New VVF purchases require at least 72 core licences per order line. At $135/core, the minimum annual VVF spend is approximately $9,720 — considerably lower than VCF’s $25,200 minimum, but still a meaningful floor for small environments.

No management domain overhead. Unlike VCF, VVF does not require a dedicated management domain with separate hosts. vCenter runs on a VM within the same hosts as your workloads, eliminating the 4-host “management domain tax” that inflates VCF costs for small environments. This is one of VVF’s most significant economic advantages for environments under 10 hosts.

Cost Comparison: VVF by Environment Size

The savings are substantial at every scale. For the 10-host scenario, VVF saves $137,600 per year before accounting for VCF’s additional management domain hosts. Over a 3-year subscription term, that is a $412,800 difference at list price — before any negotiated discounts. The question is whether the capabilities VVF excludes (NSX, SDDC Manager, larger vSAN entitlement, Aria Advanced) are worth the premium in your specific environment.

The vSAN Entitlement: 0.25 TiB/Core Reality Check

VVF includes 0.25 TiB of vSAN capacity per licensed core. This entitlement is poolable across all VVF-licensed clusters, meaning you can aggregate unused vSAN entitlement from one cluster and apply it to another. The pooling is a licensing entitlement — vSAN still operates within each cluster’s physical disk configuration.

What Does 0.25 TiB/Core Actually Provide?

For a 640-core environment, the included vSAN entitlement is 160 TiB. After accounting for RAID overhead:

For perspective, 80–107 TiB of usable storage across 640 cores means approximately 125–170 GB per core. For compute-intensive workloads with modest storage (application servers, web servers, microservices), this may be adequate. For data-intensive workloads (databases, file servers, analytics, VDI), it almost certainly is not.

The 0.25 TiB/core entitlement is best understood as a “starter” allocation — enough to evaluate vSAN and deploy it for a subset of workloads, but not enough to replace traditional SAN/NAS storage across an enterprise environment. Broadcom updated this entitlement in 2024 (from a trial-based allocation to a fully entitled capacity), making it genuinely usable rather than merely demonstrative. But it remains one quarter of VCF’s 1 TiB/core entitlement, and organisations planning to use vSAN as their primary storage platform should carefully model whether the included entitlement is sufficient or whether additional vSAN capacity purchases at $210/TiB/year will erode VVF’s cost advantage.

VVF with External Storage: The Common Deployment Model

In practice, the majority of VVF deployments use external storage (SAN or NAS) rather than vSAN as the primary storage platform. This is the most pragmatic deployment model for organisations transitioning from legacy vSphere environments where external storage arrays are already in place and fully depreciated.

Supported external storage types in VVF 9.0: VMFS on Fibre Channel (FC-SAN) and NFS v3 (NAS). These are the same storage protocols supported in legacy vSphere — your existing NetApp, Pure Storage, Dell EMC, HPE, or IBM storage arrays will work with VVF exactly as they did with standalone vSphere. No storage migration or reconfiguration is required.

The economic advantage of external storage with VVF: when you use external storage exclusively, the included 0.25 TiB/core vSAN entitlement goes unused — you are paying for vSAN capacity you do not consume. However, the VVF subscription does not include a “no vSAN” discount: the pricing is identical regardless of whether you deploy vSAN. Despite this waste, VVF at $135/core with unused vSAN capacity is still dramatically cheaper than VCF at $350/core with its larger vSAN allocation. For organisations with existing SAN investments, VVF represents the lowest-cost path to vSphere 9.0 by a significant margin.

vVols deprecation warning: VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) are deprecated in VVF 9.0 and will be fully disabled in a future 9.x release. Organisations currently using vVols with external storage arrays must plan a migration to VMFS or NFS datastores. Broadcom cites low adoption as the rationale — vVols never exceeded single-digit percentage adoption across the VMware installed base. If your environment depends on vVols for storage policy-based management, begin the transition to VMFS or NFS before upgrading to VVF 9.0.

Upgrade Paths to VVF 9.0

The path to VVF 9.0 depends on your current licensing and software version:

From vSphere Standard or Enterprise Plus (perpetual, v7 or v8): This is the most common upgrade path. You purchase VVF subscriptions for all hosts, then upgrade vSphere from your current version to 9.0. vCenter can be upgraded in-place. ESXi hosts are upgraded sequentially using vSphere Lifecycle Manager. The vSAN component does not need to be deployed if you continue using external storage — it simply becomes an available entitlement. The transition from perpetual to subscription does not require downtime for running VMs if performed host-by-host with vMotion evacuations.

From vSphere Essentials or Essentials Plus: Broadcom eliminated the Essentials product line. Small environments previously licensed under Essentials must transition to VVF, VVS (vSphere Standard), or VVEP (vSphere Enterprise Plus). The 72-core minimum order is the primary cost impact for these environments: a 3-host Essentials cluster with 48 physical cores must purchase 72 VVF core licences ($9,720/year), compared to the legacy Essentials Plus kit that cost approximately $5,000–$6,500 annually. This represents a 50–95% cost increase for the smallest VMware environments and is one of the primary drivers of SMB migration to Proxmox, Hyper-V, and other alternatives.

From VCF (downgrade to VVF): Organisations that deployed VCF and subsequently determined that NSX and SDDC Manager are not required can, at subscription renewal, transition to VVF. This requires removing NSX from the environment (un-preparing hosts from NSX transport nodes) and decommissioning SDDC Manager. The technical decommission should be planned carefully — it is not a trivial reconfiguration, particularly for environments that have deployed NSX overlay networking for VM traffic. Consult Broadcom professional services or an independent VMware specialist before attempting a VCF-to-VVF downgrade.

From VVF 8.x (if applicable): Direct upgrade to VVF 9.0 follows the standard vSphere upgrade path. Validate firmware and BIOS compatibility against the VCF/VVF 9.0 Hardware Compatibility List before proceeding. The upgrade sequence follows the same pattern as VCF: operations components first, then vCenter, then ESXi hosts.

When VVF Is the Right Choice

VVF is the correct VMware licensing choice for a specific and common enterprise profile. Understanding when VVF excels — and when it falls short — prevents both overspending on VCF capabilities you will never use and underspending on VVF only to discover that critical capabilities are missing.

VVF is the right choice when:

Your environment uses external storage (SAN/NAS) as the primary storage platform and does not need vSAN as a comprehensive HCI solution. VVF’s modest vSAN entitlement is irrelevant if your storage strategy is already SAN-based.

Your networking requirements are met by standard vSphere distributed switches (vDS). If your network architecture uses VLANs and standard switching without overlay networking, micro-segmentation, or software-defined firewalling, NSX adds no value and VCF’s premium is unjustified.

Your environment is under 20 hosts and the VCF management domain (minimum 4 dedicated hosts) represents a disproportionate infrastructure and licensing overhead. VVF eliminates this overhead entirely — vCenter runs alongside workload VMs on shared hosts.

Your operational model is vCenter-driven (GUI-based management, manual or scripted operations) rather than requiring full SDDC Manager lifecycle automation. Many enterprise VMware teams have decades of vCenter operational experience and do not need or want SDDC Manager’s opinionated automation framework.

You need access to vSphere 9.0 but cannot justify VCF’s premium. VVF is the only path to vSphere 9.0 below $350/core, making it the default choice for organisations that need version currency without the full SDDC stack.

VVF is not the right choice when:

You need NSX for any reason (overlay networking, micro-segmentation, distributed firewalling). NSX is not available with VVF, not even as a paid add-on. If NSX is required today or likely within 2–3 years, purchase VCF now to avoid a costly mid-term upgrade.

You need vSAN as your primary storage platform with more than 0.25 TiB per core of capacity. While additional vSAN TiBs can be purchased as add-ons, the additional cost may erode VVF’s economic advantage over VCF, whose 1 TiB/core entitlement is four times larger.

You are building a self-service private cloud with tenant isolation, blueprint-driven provisioning, and multi-cloud automation. VCF Automation (Aria Automation) is VCF-only and has no direct equivalent in VVF.

Legacy vSphere: When Standalone Licences Still Make Sense

Not every environment needs VVF. Broadcom continues to sell standalone vSphere Standard (~$50/core/year) and vSphere Enterprise Plus (~$150/core/year) for specific customer segments. These products are capped at vSphere 8 Update 3 and will not receive vSphere 9.0 features, but they remain viable options for certain use cases.

vSphere Standard ($50/core): appropriate for small, stable environments running straightforward virtualisation that do not require DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), distributed virtual switches, or vSAN. At $50/core, Standard is the lowest-cost VMware option by a significant margin. For organisations with a 3-host cluster running well-understood workloads that do not need frequent patching to the latest version, Standard provides basic virtualisation at one-third of VVF’s cost.

vSphere Enterprise Plus ($150/core): provides DRS, DvS, Host Profiles, and other advanced features on the v8 branch. At $150/core, Enterprise Plus is actually more expensive than VVF ($135/core) while providing fewer capabilities (no vSAN entitlement, no Kubernetes, no Aria Operations). This pricing anomaly makes Enterprise Plus a poor choice for new purchases in almost every scenario — VVF delivers more at a lower price point. The only justification for Enterprise Plus over VVF is an explicit decision to avoid the bundled vSAN and Kubernetes components and remain on the v8 branch for compatibility reasons.

For environments where vSphere 8 version currency is acceptable and the timeline to end-of-support is manageable, standalone vSphere buys time to evaluate alternatives (Proxmox, Nutanix, Hyper-V, KVM/OpenStack) without committing to the VVF/VCF subscription model. This “sweating the assets” strategy is viable for 12–24 months but becomes increasingly risky as Broadcom phases out legacy support renewals and security patches on the v8 branch.

Compliance and Reporting in VVF 9.0

Like VCF 9.0, VVF 9.0 introduces compliance reporting obligations that did not exist in previous vSphere versions. Broadcom requires periodic usage reporting documenting deployed core counts and vSAN consumption. The enforcement mechanism is the same as VCF: failure to submit compliance reports results in degraded management capabilities and suspension of updates and support. This represents a fundamental shift from legacy vSphere, where licence compliance was effectively self-certified with infrequent audits.

VVF includes base-tier VCF Operations (Aria Operations) that provides the monitoring and reporting capabilities needed to generate compliance reports. However, the base tier is less comprehensive than VCF’s Advanced tier — organisations with complex environments may need to supplement with manual inventory scripts or third-party asset management tools to ensure reporting accuracy. Broadcom has published KB articles with inventory and calculator scripts (KB 95927 and KB 96426) specifically designed to help customers count cores and vSAN TiBs for compliance reporting.

Practically, compliance reporting for VVF requires establishing a clear process: identifying who is responsible for report preparation and submission, validating that reported core counts match actual physical hardware (including hosts added mid-term), confirming that vSAN TiB consumption does not exceed entitlement (or that add-on capacity has been purchased for the excess), and maintaining audit-ready documentation of all VVF-licensed hosts. Organisations that previously managed VMware licensing with a spreadsheet and annual licence key reconciliation will need a more rigorous, continuous process under VVF 9.0.

Negotiation Strategies for VVF

VVF subscriptions are negotiable, though typically with less discount flexibility than VCF due to the lower list price and thinner margins. The following strategies are drawn from our advisory engagements.

1. Consolidate workloads to reduce core count. The most effective cost reduction for VVF is the same as for VCF: fewer licensed cores means lower total cost. Right-size over-provisioned VMs, decommission unused hosts, and migrate non-critical workloads off VMware. A 15–20% core count reduction at $135/core saves $20/core/year or $12,800 annually on a 640-core environment.

2. Negotiate multi-year terms for price protection. 3-year and 5-year VVF commitments typically yield 10–20% discounts versus the 1-year list price. More importantly, they lock the per-core price for the term, protecting against future price increases. Given Broadcom’s track record of aggressive price escalation, price certainty has tangible value.

3. Co-terminate VVF with other Broadcom contracts. If your organisation has multiple VMware, Symantec, or other Broadcom subscriptions, co-terminating renewal dates creates a larger combined deal that improves negotiation leverage. Broadcom’s deal desk responds to total deal value, not individual product margins.

4. Present credible alternatives. The most effective VVF negotiation lever is the same as for VCF: a documented, credible plan to migrate a portion of the VMware estate to an alternative platform. For VVF customers — who by definition are running simpler virtualisation environments without NSX or SDDC Manager dependencies — the migration path to alternatives like Proxmox or Nutanix is often more straightforward than for VCF customers. This makes the alternative credible, which is what drives Broadcom discount approvals.

5. Challenge the VVF-vs-VCF decision at renewal. If you currently run VCF and are approaching renewal, analyse whether your environment actually uses the VCF-specific capabilities (NSX, SDDC Manager, VCF Automation, Aria Advanced). If these features are deployed minimally or not at all, downgrading to VVF at renewal saves $215/core/year. We consistently find that 20–30% of VCF customers are over-licensed — they deployed VCF because it was recommended by their reseller or Broadcom, not because their workloads required it.

Total Cost Modelling: VVF in Practice

Scenario A: Small Office / ROBO (3 Hosts, External SAN)

For small environments, VVF is approximately 2× the cost of legacy Essentials Plus and 2× the cost of Proxmox with Premium support. The question is whether VMware ecosystem familiarity, existing operational processes, and vSphere 9.0 access justify the premium.

Scenario B: Mid-Size Data Centre (10 Hosts, vSAN HCI)

Even with the $21,000 vSAN add-on, VVF delivers a 66% saving versus VCF for this environment. The 4-host management domain that VCF requires ($89,600/year in additional licensing) is entirely eliminated with VVF. This scenario illustrates why VVF is often the economically optimal choice for mid-size environments that do not require NSX.

Scenario C: Enterprise (20 Hosts, Mixed Storage, VCF Downgrade)

For organisations currently on VCF that are not utilising NSX or SDDC Manager, the VCF-to-VVF downgrade represents one of the most impactful cost optimisation opportunities available. A $364,800 annual saving — $1.09 million over a 3-year term — for relinquishing capabilities that were never deployed. This is a conversation we have with approximately one-third of our Broadcom advisory clients.

Frequently Asked Questions