Since late 2023, VMware by Broadcom has made a series of changes to its licensing models and product portfolios.

• In Q4 2023, VMware by Broadcom announced “the end of sale of perpetual licenses, Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings, and hybrid purchase program/subscription purchase program (HPP/SPP) credits,” meaning that all products/services would be available as subscription software only.
• In Q1 2024, VMware by Broadcom consolidated over 50 standalone products into four solutions with add-ons — the vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (VVEP) and vSphere Standard (VVS) that target the lightweight virtualization needs of small and midsize businesses, and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), which are enterprise-class solutions with more functionality.
• In Q4 2024, vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (VVEP) was removed from the offering list, and a new option for using vSphere — vSphere Enterprise Plus — was added. This new portfolio allows users to leverage advanced virtualization features such as distributed switches, trust authority, DRS, VM encryption, SR-IOV, vGPU, etc.
• In Q1 2025, some VMware by Broadcom distributors disclosed that, since April 10, 2025, it would suspend the offering of vSphere Standard (VVS) in APJ (Asian-Pacific and Japan) regions and introduce a 72-core minimum purchase quantity to all product portfolios.

VMware by Broadcom product portfolios by April 2025.

Retrieved from VMware by Broadcom — vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation Frequently Asked Questions

These changes made it more difficult for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that don’t run massive clusters to use VMware in a flexible and cost-efficient way.

• As VVS and vSphere Enterprise Plus only provide virtualization and centralized management services, users who want to use vSAN or other services can only subscribe to the two enterprise-class solutions, VVF and VCF. These solutions include limited vSAN capacity (250 GB per CPU core for VVF and 1 TiB per CPU core for VCF). If users need more storage capacity, they will need to purchase additional add-on licenses.
• If the enterprise’s servers don’t add up to 72 cores, they still need to pay for 72 cores.
• For APJ enterprises that only use vSphere and enterprises that want to deploy LLMs on VMware clusters (i.e., using the vGPU feature), they may need to subscribe to vSphere Enterprise Plus edition.

For more FAQ regarding VMware alternatives, please refer to  https://www.arcfra.com/vmware-alternative/.