The Broadcom VMware Licensing Tracker

Last verified 22 September 2026. Every fact below is tied to a Broadcom or European Commission primary source in the table at the end. Where a claim could not be confirmed from a primary source, the page says so plainly instead of stating it. If a date here disagrees with your reseller, your reseller is winning and this page needs updating.

What you can buy today

Broadcom collapsed its portfolio into two bundles and three standalone component subscriptions. VCF and vSphere Foundation are each sold as a single SKU. There are no Standard, Advanced or Enterprise editions inside either one, and any source describing those is describing the pre-acquisition structure.

VCF adds NSX, VCF Operations for Networks, VCF Operations Fleet Management, VCF Automation and Aria Suite Enterprise over vSphere Foundation. vSphere Foundation carries vSphere, vSphere Kubernetes Service, vSAN at a quarter of the VCF rate, VCF Operations, and Aria Suite Standard, and that Aria entitlement can only monitor vSphere Foundation cores.

Every licence is counted per physical core, with a 16 core floor per processor

The wording is identical across the published program documentation for VCF, vSphere Foundation, vSphere Standard, vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSphere Essentials Plus. The software is subscription software licensed on a per core metric with a minimum licensing requirement of 16 cores per processor. VCF Edge carries an 8 core minimum instead.

Four counting rules decide your bill.

• Physical cores only. Hyperthreading does not count.
• Every core on a licensed server counts, including cores you switched off in the BIOS.
• A CPU with fewer than 16 cores is still charged as 16. Two 8 core CPUs cost 32 cores, not 16. Broadcom publishes the rule in knowledge base article 313548.
• Capacity is summed across every ESXi host you intend to license.

Broadcom’s own worked example makes the arithmetic concrete. A host with two 8 core CPUs plus a host with two 24 core CPUs becomes 2 x 16 plus 2 x 24, which is 80 cores to license.

No minimum cores per virtual machine appears anywhere in the published program documentation. The meter counts host cores, not virtual cores. The 8 vCPU limit you may have seen belongs to the free hypervisor, not to licensing.

From version 9.0 the two bundles share one licensing model. You assign licences to vCenter instances and everything attached is licensed automatically, which means you no longer license NSX, HCX or VCF Automation individually. Subscription licence files replaced the 25 character licence keys, and version 9.1 added direct assignment to individual assets which overrides the automatic assignment.

What ended when the acquisition closed

Broadcom ended the sale of perpetual licences, ended Support and Subscription renewals for perpetual offerings, and ended HPP and SPP credits. That took effect with the 11 December 2023 announcement, with effective dates varying by product.

This matters to buyers for one reason. End of sale is not end of life. Existing perpetual licences keep working, and entitled features stay unlocked. What lapses is your access to new patches, security updates and version upgrades, and your ability to open a support request. Broadcom does continue to publish zero day patches for critical severity alerts, which it defines as CVSS 9.0 and above, to perpetual customers whose support has expired, and it scopes that programme to supported versions, which it states is version 8.x.

A long list of products stopped being sold standalone and were folded into the bundles, including NSX, vSAN, HCX, Site Recovery Manager, the Aria products, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and vCenter Standard.

The support dates that decide your upgrade

Those dates are published by Broadcom in knowledge base article 415405 for vSphere 7 and in the official End of Technical Guidance date list. One nuance in that table is easy to miss. End of Technical Guidance applies to valid VMware contracts only. Broadcom’s own footnote says it does not apply to Broadcom contracts, so do not plan around that column without checking your contract form.

General support for vSphere 7.x ended on 2 October 2025. After that date Broadcom states customers cannot receive product support, security patches or updates, and cannot engage Broadcom Support for those releases. Previously published fixes stay downloadable for the remainder of your maintenance term. The practical consequence is that staying on 7.x buys nothing, and moving to 8.x buys until October 2027, which is the next cliff rather than a destination.

VCF moved to a longer support model with version 9.0, from five years of general support plus two optional years of extended support to six plus one. Broadcom states a three year major release cadence with minor releases roughly every nine months, and estimates the 9.x code line reaching end of service on 17 June 2031.

Four things the market repeats that the sources do not support

This section exists because the licensing content published about Broadcom is unusually polluted, and because we would rather flag a gap than fill it with a guess.

A 72 core order minimum. This has been reported but has never been officially confirmed in public. It appeared in April 2025 in a distributor memo, was reported within days as reversed, and Broadcom separately published a video describing a 72 core order minimum alongside the existing 16 core CPU minimum. Broadcom’s current published documentation specifies only the 16 core per processor floor and mentions no order minimum. The public record was never reconciled, so we are not asserting it in either direction. Ask your reseller in writing.

Broadcom accelerated vSphere 7 support to end sooner. False. Broadcom’s own announcement moved the date later, from 2 April 2025 to 2 October 2025, a six month extension. The documented short notice retirements after the acquisition were in adjacent products such as Skyline Advisor and several Aria and VCF Operations management packs, not in vSphere, vSAN or VCF.

Current list prices. Not published. Broadcom does not appear to publish VMware list prices, so every 2026 figure circulating online is quote only and unverifiable. The only vendor published per core figures we found come from a December 2023 partner enablement deck, roughly 350 US dollars per core for VCF and 135 for vSphere Foundation on a three year term. Treat those as historical and unevidenced for 2026.

Editions inside VCF and vSphere Foundation. None. Both are single SKUs.

Where the regulators actually stand

Be careful with this one, because the common summary overstates it.

The European Commission cleared the acquisition on 12 July 2023 with conditions, in case M.10806. The concern it acted on was interoperability in Fibre Channel host bus adapters, where it found Broadcom could foreclose Marvell. It explicitly ruled out a bundling concern and it did not address VMware’s licensing model, as its own press release records. The commitments run for ten years under a monitoring trustee.

Separately, the Commission has been examining Broadcom’s conduct since 2024. It confirmed sending requests for information in April 2024. CISPE, a cloud industry group, filed a competition complaint on 19 March 2026 and asked for interim measures, and the Commission has publicly confirmed only that it is assessing that complaint. Broadcom challenged a Commission request for information at the General Court, and on 3 August 2026 the President of the General Court refused to suspend it. We found no Commission decision, statement of objections, or formal proceeding opening concerning Broadcom’s VMware conduct.

In the United Kingdom the merger was cleared on 21 August 2023. The Competition and Markets Authority ran a cloud services market investigation from October 2023 to July 2025, and it did not examine Broadcom or VMware licensing. We checked that directly, searching the 637 page final decision and its licensing appendices, which contain no substantive mention of either company.

In Germany the Federal Government answered a Bundestag question on the takeover in June 2024, stated that it assumed licence costs would increase, and disclosed federal framework contract call off volumes including 234,947,903 euros on one VMware software framework.

What named customers have done

These are checkable, named positions rather than survey sentiment.

On surveys, read the commissioning. CloudBolt surveyed 302 IT decision makers and sells VMware alternatives. Forrester’s 137 percent ROI study on VCF 9 rests on eight interviews and 55 surveyed customers and was commissioned by Broadcom. A VMUG survey rests on 453 members and is published by Broadcom. CISPE’s cost increase figures come from an advocacy body rather than a sample. None of these is neutral, and the honest reading is that the direction of the market is clearer than any single number.

What Broadcom says

Broadcom’s position is on the record and should be read alongside the rest. Its chief executive said in November 2022, before the deal closed, that the answer to whether it intended to raise VMware prices was simple, no. Broadcom states that it halved VCF list pricing relative to comparable legacy subscriptions, that perpetual customers retain access to critical severity patches, and that its partner programme invites more than 18,000 resellers. It disputes CISPE’s allegations and describes that organisation as funded by hyperscalers.

We are quoting those as Broadcom’s claims. The price claim in particular is a vendor comparison to legacy list prices, not something an independent party has verified.

Sources and verification status

Primary sources for the licensing structure and counting rules are Broadcom’s published Specific Program Documentation for each product, current editions dating from February, May and June 2026, together with Broadcom knowledge base article 313548 on core counting, updated June 2026, and the VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 and 9.1 licensing documentation. Support dates come from Broadcom knowledge base articles 415405, 326984 and 392942, the official End of Technical Guidance date list, and Broadcom’s own extension and support model announcements. Regulatory detail comes from the European Commission competition case M.10806, Commission press release IP/23/3777, the General Court order of 3 August 2026, the CMA cloud services market investigation, and Bundestag document 20/11763. Customer positions are drawn from court reporting and customer statements.

Where we could not confirm something from a primary source, we say so. A tracker that quietly omits what it cannot prove is worth less than one that admits the gap.