VMware by Broadcom - Product Changes, 1st Dec 2025

In their quest to simplify and consolidate VMware to be easy to use, easy to understand and simpler to deploy, Broadcom have gone further with their product developments which came into effect on December 1^st. These ensure the VMware product remains market leading.

In this article we hope to explain what these changes are, what they mean to you and show how boxxe can help with any decisions you might face about how to proceed. The following sections describe the changes, what the new license rules are and what you need to do when purchasing or upgrading. boxxe can help you rationalise any decisions in order to ensure you right size your environment from day one.

When Broadcom acquired VMware, they dramatically simplified the product range down to four products:

• VMware vSphere Standard – known simply as Standard

• VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus – known simply as Enterprise Plus

• VMware vSphere Foundation – known simply as VVF

• VMware Cloud Foundation – known simply as VCF

As of 1st December, Broadcom's VMware Offerings have been simplified to:

• VMware vSphere Standard, and

• VMware Cloud Foundation

In other words, you have a choice between VCF and vSphere Standard. It’s very simple and in almost every case, the obvious choice is VCF. It’s feature rich and supports every possible scenario faced by customers today.

VMware Cloud Foundation is an amalgamation of all the features and functionality, previously sold separately as part of the VMware product range. Most obviously it includes;

• vSphere

• vCenter

• NSX – network virtualisation

• vSAN – disk virtualisation

• All management and data resilience features

It is the most complete private cloud platform available today, supporting virtual machines, Kubernetes and object storage AND you have complete flexibility as to whether you run them on prem, in the cloud or as a hybrid, private cloud of your own design.

In contrast to VCF, VMware vSphere Standard is VMware’s traditional hypervisor. It includes vSphere and vCenter and is a cost-effective introduction to VMware for people who have much smaller environments with little or no need for those enterprise features.

Not much has changed in terms of how the VMware platform is licensed as of the December 1^st announcements but there are a couple of things that are worth clarifying.

Firstly, there is now a minimum purchase requirement of 72 cores. As we’re sure you are aware, VMware is a subscription platform that is licensed by the number of cores in each host. That minimum purchase is now 72 cores. vSphere Standard has a maximum operational limit of 512 cores. This translates, roughly, to sixteen hosts and we don’t envisage that is ever going to affect any of our customers because, at sixteen hosts, you should really be using VCF.

Please be aware this update applies to UK only.