VMware licensing changes: what you need to know
3 minute read
Vicki Sammons
December 19th, 2025
The world of VMware is evolving rapidly. Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, there have been significant changes to the company’s product strategy and licensing model. If you rely on VMware solutions, it’s essential to understand what’s changed, how it affects your organisation, and how you can make the most of the new offerings.
What’s changed?
As of 1st December in the UK, there are now just two main offerings available:
- VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
- vSphere Standard
Let’s take a closer look at what each of these solutions provides.
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): the modern private cloud platform
VMware Cloud Foundation is designed as an industry-leading private cloud platform. It brings together the agility, scalability, and automation of public cloud environments with the control, security, and resilience of traditional data centres. Here’s what makes VCF stand out:
- Unified management: manage workloads seamlessly across on-premises, public, sovereign, edge, and telco clouds.
- Advanced services: benefit from built-in cyber compliance, security, load balancing, data services, application services, network observability, business operations, and identity security.
- Operational efficiency: automation tools streamline capacity, configuration, tenancy, compute, storage, and networking management.
- Cost and productivity gains: Achieve more with less, thanks to integrated automation and unified operations.
Learn about the changes to VCF 9.0 and what is means for you.
vSphere Standard: reliable virtualisation for smaller deployments
vSphere Standard remains VMware’s trusted hypervisor for basic server virtualisation. It’s ideal for development, testing, and smaller production environments. With vSphere Standard, you get:
- Essential features for virtualising physical servers
- Tools to manage virtual machines efficiently
- High availability and reliability for your workloads
Key licensing changes
The new licensing model introduces important requirements:
- Minimum purchase: 72 cores
- Maximum for vSphere Standard: 512 cores
These changes mean organisations need to review their current deployments and ensure compliance with the new core-based licensing structure.
How Phoenix can help
Navigating licensing changes can be complex. As a Broadcom Expert Advantage Partner, our VMware product specialists are here to help you understand what these changes mean for your organisation. Book a free VMware Licensing Health Check to ensure you’re compliant and optimised for the future.
Your next steps
Our VMware Specialists are on hand to support you through these changes. By booking a free VMware Licensing Health Check, we’ll evaluate your existing VMware estate and guide you through the changes.
FAQ’s
- VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
- vSphere Standard (VVS)
Licensing is now based on the number of physical CPU cores, not sockets (min 16 cores per CPU). There is a minimum purchase requirement – currently 72 cores per product, per purchase order. Even if your environment uses fewer cores, you must licence at least 72 cores for each product edition you deploy.
You can continue to use existing perpetual licences providing your support contract is active. However, once support expires, you must transition to a subscription model to receive updates, patches, and support.
Our VMware specialists can provide a free licensing health check, help you audit your environment, and develop a strategy to optimise costs and compliance.
About the author
Vicki Sammons, Solutions Manager
Vicki joined Phoenix in 2019, quickly moving to Solutions Manager. She and her team are responsible for looking after our key hybrid infrastructure partners – matching customer requirements to vendor solutions, ensuring maximum value and performance, and managing these partner relationships to optimise customer outcomes.