VMware Product and Licensing Changes
As many of you, we are watching the unfolding drama of the Broadcom acquisition of Vmware and trying to understand and evaluate the impact on VMware customers. In this post we provide links to a number of articles and pages that, in our opinion, summarize the resulting VMware vSphere product family changes.
VMware product and licensing changes with the release of vSphere Foundation 9.0 and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0
(June 2025)
Key Licensing Changes in VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and vSphere 9.0:
- Environment is licensed by using a VCF Operations instance and the VMware Cloud Foundation Business Services console. To license your environment, you must install a VCF Operations instance, register it in the VCF Business Services console, and add licenses with available capacity.
- You assign licenses only to the vCenter instances. The other product components added to the licensed vCenter instances are then automatically licensed.
- Subscription-based license files replace the use of the 25-character license keys.
- With your subscription for a product, you receive both a version 9.0 default license, and license keys for version 8.x of the product.
- License usage reports are required at least once every 180 days to maintain your licenses.
Availability of vSphere Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus - According to the VMware vSphere Product Line Comparison doc:
- vSphere Standard and vSphere Enterprise Plus are only available as versions up to the 8 Update 3 release.
- vSphere 9.0 features are only available as part of VMware vSphere Foundation 9.0 and VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0.
VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Pricing (unofficial)
(December 2024)
Updated VCF Portfolio Offerings - Adding New Value and Options
(Last Updated: 2024-12-18)
As a part of recent server virtualization portfolio update Vmware/Broadcom re-introduced VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and expanded vSAN capacity entitlement for VMware vSphere Foundation to 0.25 TiB per core.
End Of General Availability of the Free vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi 7.x and 8.x) (KB 2107518)
(Last Updated: 2024-02-14)
The VMware vSphere Hypervisor (Free Edition) has been marked as EOGA (End of General Availability) and there is no equivalent replacement product.
Counting Cores for VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation and TiBs for vSAN (KB 95927)
(Last Updated: 2024-02-14)
This VMware KB article describes how to determine the number of subscriptions required to properly license the following VMware products - VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), and VMware vSAN.
VMware Product Guide
(February 2024)
VMware's New Licensing Fireside Chat with CDW
(January 24, 2024)
In this video CDW team provides an overview on the new VMware licensing model and answers some related questions.
VMware End Of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services
(Last Updated: 2024-01-22)
This VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog post lists all discontinued products and offerings and outlines replacement options, if available.
Here is a short excerpt:
| Products no longer available as standalone (all editions and pricing metrics) |
Replacement Product Included in VCF/VVF/Add-on? (Y/N) |
Which Product or Add-On? |
| VMware Aria Automation | Y | VCF |
| VMware Aria Operations | Y | VVF, VCF |
| VMware Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware Cloud Foundation/VCF+/VCF-S (excluding new VCF subscription offering) | N | Replaced with VMware Cloud Foundation (new) |
| VMware NSX | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware Site Recovery Manager | Y | SRM Add-On Service |
| VMware vCenter Foundation | N | |
| VMware vCenter Standard | Y | VCF, VVF and vSphere STD |
| VMware vSAN+ | N | |
| VMware vSAN | Y | VCF, VVF, vSAN add-on |
| VMware vSphere Advanced | N | |
| VMware vSphere Basic | N | |
| VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware vSphere Enterprise | N | |
| VMware vSphere Essentials Plus (excluding new subscription offering) | Y | Replaced with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit |
| VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) | N | |
| VMware vSphere Standard (excluding subscription) | Y | Replaced with new vSphere Standard |
| VMware vSphere+ | N |
Decoding the new Broadcom VMware vSphere Licensing Packages (for Small Deployments)
(Last Updated: 2024-01-08)
This Veeam Community post outlines vSphere subscription packages and pricing details (reproduced below) and provides subscription cost evaluation for a number of deployment scenarios.
VMware by Broadcom Dramatically Simplifies Offer Lineup and Licensing Model
(December 11, 2023)
Provides an overview of the changes to the VMware Cloud Foundation division portfolio.