Part 3 of the 10-part VCF series. Part 2 kept pointing at licensing as the thing everyone actually worries about, so here it is. This is a map of how the model works today, where the costs hide, and how to avoid paying for cores you will never run. It is not a rant about whether the model is fair.
Why This Part Exists
Ask any VMware admin what changed after the Broadcom acquisition and licensing is the first thing out of their mouth. The technology evolved. The commercial model was rebuilt from the ground up. Perpetual licences are gone, the product catalogue shrank to a handful of bundles, and everything is now counted per core on a subscription. If you get the counting or the bundle choice wrong, you can overpay by a wide margin before you have deployed a single workload. So let’s get the rules straight.
The Three Rules That Set Your Bill
Almost every surprise on a VCF quote traces back to one of three rules. Learn these and the rest of the model falls into place.
- Subscription only. Broadcom ended perpetual VMware licensing in early 2024, shortly after the acquisition closed. Everything now runs on a term subscription that you renew to keep access to updates and support. There is no per-VM option and no per-socket option any more.
- Per physical core, and every core counts. The metric is the physical CPU core. You license every core in every CPU of every host running the software, whether or not the workloads use that capacity. Broadcom’s own core-counting guidance is blunt about the edge cases: you count physical cores, not hyperthreads, and you count cores even if they are disabled in the BIOS. Turning cores off in firmware does not lower the bill.
- A 16-core minimum per CPU. Each populated physical CPU carries a floor of 16 cores for licensing, even if the silicon has fewer. Broadcom’s counting KB spells it out with an example: a host with two 8-core CPUs is licensed as two 16-core CPUs. Those extra eight cores per socket are phantom cores you pay for and cannot use.
There is a fourth number you will hear constantly, and it needs care. Since around April 2025, distributors and industry press have reported a 72-core minimum on new orders, applied per order line rather than per CPU. The Register and CRN covered it when Arrow emailed partners about the jump from 16 to 72. The practical effect is real: a small single-socket box can end up carrying a 72-core purchase. The important nuance is that the hard, Broadcom-documented floor is the 16-core-per-CPU counting rule. The 72-core figure is an order minimum that shapes quotes and has moved before, so treat it as something to confirm in writing with your reseller for your specific deal, not as an immutable law. When I size a customer’s estate, I model both the 16-core counting floor and whatever order minimum their channel is actually applying, because the two are different levers.
From 168 Products to Four Bundles
Before the acquisition, VMware sold well over a hundred separate products, editions and add-ons. Broadcom collapsed that into four purchasable bundles. You can no longer buy a single vCenter licence or a standalone vSAN SKU off the shelf. You pick a bundle, and the components come with it.
- vSphere Standard. Entry-level hypervisor licensing for basic virtualisation.
- vSphere Enterprise Plus. The fuller vSphere feature set, which took over from the retired Essentials Plus tier.
- vSphere Foundation (VVF). The compute-centric bundle. You get vSphere, a vSAN entitlement and the operations tooling, without the full software-defined data center on top.
- VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The flagship full-stack bundle, and the one this series is about.
For most people weighing a serious platform, the real decision sits between the last two: VVF or VCF. Getting that choice wrong is the single most expensive mistake in a renewal, because the per-core rates are not close.
What Is Actually in the VCF Bundle
VCF is sold as one integrated product. The per-core price buys the whole software-defined data center, which is Broadcom’s justification for the higher rate. In the box you get vSphere, vSAN, NSX for networking and security, VCF Operations and VCF Automation, and as of the 9.x line, Private AI Services included rather than sold separately. Everything you covered in Part 1 arrives under one licence.
VVF is the lighter cousin. It gives you vSphere, vSAN and operations tooling, but it leaves out NSX and the full cloud automation layer. The storage entitlement is where the gap shows most clearly. VCF includes 1 TiB of vSAN capacity for every core you licence. VVF includes 0.25 TiB per core, rounded up. So the same core count buys four times the bundled vSAN capacity under VCF, and in both cases you can buy extra vSAN capacity by the TiB if your design needs more.
That difference is the whole game. If vSAN and NSX are central to your architecture, the VCF bundle can genuinely work out cheaper than buying equivalent capability piecemeal. If you run third-party storage and networking and only need the hypervisor, VCF has you paying for a stack you will never light up, and VVF is the honest fit. Run that comparison against the features you actually deploy, not the ones you imagine you might.
The Money, With the Caveats It Deserves
Broadcom does not publish list prices openly, so anyone quoting exact figures is working from advisory data and closed deals. With that caveat firmly in place, licensing specialists put VCF in the region of a few hundred dollars per core per year at list, commonly cited around $350, with VVF running roughly half of that. Real invoices land lower after discount, and the spread between shops is wide. Treat any figure you read, including these, as a starting point to pressure-test, not a budget line.
The direction of travel is easier to state than the exact number. Advisory firms that benchmarked dozens of renewals through 2024 and 2025 report annual costs rising two to five times for estates that had only ever licensed vSphere and then moved to the full bundle. The core minimums add their own tax, inflating counts by a meaningful chunk on hosts built around low-core CPUs. Consolidating onto fewer, denser hosts claws some of that back, often in the region of a fifth to a quarter of the increase before you even open the discount conversation. There is also a renewal trap worth knowing about: reporting around the 2025 changes described a penalty of roughly 20 percent for customers who let their subscription lapse past the renewal date, so the anniversary matters.
The 9.1 Mechanics You Will Actually Touch
A few operational details are specific to how VCF 9.x handles licensing day to day.
Subscriptions come on one, three or five year terms, with the longer commitments carrying lower per-core rates. After you deploy or upgrade, the software runs in a 90-day evaluation mode, during which you must apply your licences. In VCF 9.1’s connected mode, licence handling is far less manual than it used to be. The Business Services Console on Broadcom’s side pushes licence files down to VCF Operations automatically, refreshing on a regular cycle, so you are no longer copying licence keys around by hand. And if you are looking at edge sites, note that VCF Edge relaxes the per-CPU floor to 8 cores rather than 16, which changes the math for small remote boxes.
One more practical point that follows from Part 2. If you still run Horizon for VDI, remember that it now belongs to Omnissa, not Broadcom. That means two vendors and two renewals: Omnissa for the desktop layer, Broadcom for the vSphere, VVF or VCF infrastructure underneath it. Budget for both.
How to Avoid Overpaying
The model punishes guesswork, so do the homework before the quote lands. Count your cores properly first. Broadcom publishes a core-counting KB and a PowerCLI script that reads your real inventory and applies the 16-core floor for you, which beats estimating from a spreadsheet. With an accurate core count in hand, decide the bundle honestly by listing the features you deploy today, not the roadmap you hope to reach. Then model consolidation, because moving to denser hosts is one of the few levers that genuinely lowers a per-core bill. Confirm any order minimum in writing so you know exactly what is being applied and why. And watch your renewal date, because lapsing past it can cost you.
The Bottom Line
VCF licensing is not complicated once you separate the fixed rules from the negotiable ones. The fixed rules are subscription-only, per physical core, every core counted, and a 16-core floor per CPU. The negotiable and reseller-specific pieces, the order minimums, the discounts, the actual per-core rate, are where your homework pays off. Count accurately, match the bundle to what you truly run, model consolidation, and go into the renewal with your own numbers rather than the vendor’s. Next in Part 4 we leave the commercials behind and get into architecture: management domains, workload domains and how the platform actually fits together.