Broadcom heard the user feedback, finally, and is releasing its VMware vSphere virtual machine software as a standalone package for deployments of up to 128 cores.
The package is called vSphere Express, and will be available in all regions by the end of January 2027.
This release targets smaller deployments of up to 128 CPU cores, said Prashanth Shenoy, CMO and vice president of product marketing for the VCF Division, during a press conference this week.
“The idea was to make sure we have the right product for the right fit at the right scale that the customers need,” he said. “And if our customers require more than that, obviously they can upgrade” to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
Competitive pressures and unused capacity
Shenoy did not acknowledge any competitive pressures that might have forced Broadcom to unbundle vSphere. Instead, he focused on the value proposition a hypervisor platform would provide.
“This is really targeted towards what we call the smaller virtualization environments, where customers still want that essential virtualization capability that vSphere provides, and don't want a full-stack private cloud or even an enterprise-grade virtualization foundation,” he said.
Shenoy also pointed to continued adoption of the full VCF platform among large enterprise customers. As of September, version 9 of the VCF platform had 2,600 customers running over 24 million allocated cores.
But VCF's enterprise adoption tells only part of the story. Nick Watson, chief technologist for the analyst firm C4C Group, said that releasing vSphere as a stand-alone product was necessary due to low-end customers leaving for competitors.
“My reading is that Express exists because customers looked at VCF, did the sums and started packing. This is Broadcom putting a door back on the building,” he wrote in an email.
Broadcom made the mistake of assuming every customer would need a full cloud platform rather than a set of hypervisor management software, Watson argued.
C4C consulted with Broadcom value-added resellers (VARs) and distributors to get an early glimpse of vSphere Express pricing, which the consultancy concluded will cost $9,600 per year (Broadcom execs did not reveal pricing in the press conference).
“Every estate below 128 cores pays for 128 [cores]," Watson noted, warning that in this setup, “the smaller you are, the more unused capacity you’re buying.”
Back to vSphere
The vSphere Express package is built on the current version of vSphere 9, Broadcom’s virtualization platform.
The package includes the VMware ESXi hypervisor. A hypervisor creates a dedicated space to run virtual machines—environments that behave like a full server to an application, complete with dedicated memory and CPU time—allowing administrators to stack multiple applications on a single server.
vSphere also has a management plane, called the VMware vCenter Server, used to control multiple instances of ESXi for tasks like authentication, resource balancing, host provisioning, and other cluster-wide automation tasks.
The vSphere Express package includes some advanced features for managing VMs, such as live migration of VMs across servers (using vMotion), automatic restarts of failed virtual machines, a distributed switch for centralized network management, fast patching and built-in zero trust security with support for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). TPM and the virtual TPM provide hardware-based encryption to secure sensitive operations.
With roots as a fabless chipmaker, Broadcom entered the virtualization business in 2023 when it purchased VMware for $69 billion. The company focused its efforts on VCF, positioning it as a turnkey platform for running a private cloud. VCF bundled vSphere along with software for managing storage (vSAN), networking (NSX), and cloud management and automation (Aria).
The idea was that VCF provides a single platform for an integrated software-defined data center enabling enterprises to run their own private clouds, rather than paying out for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or other commercial cloud operations.
Perhaps because Broadcom focused its marketing efforts on VCF at the large-scale enterprises, the company received considerable criticism for aggressive licensing costs, both from small and large businesses alike.
Almost immediately, Broadcom discontinued standalone perpetual licensing for vSphere in favor of licenses for the full VCF suite. Many organizations, however, did not require the full cloud suite; some even bought the package and let components go unused just to maintain their vSphere instances.
Companies with competing virtualization platforms, such as Nutanix and Red Hat, capitalized on this dissatisfaction with licensing. Broadcom must have noticed, given that the company discontinued a library earlier this year that third parties used to move VMs out of the ESX ecosystem.
Additional VCF updates
Broadcom released the latest version of VCF, version 9.1, in May, though it continues to work on refinements for the platform, Shenoy said.
The company has been expanding VCF for more AI-driven workloads, he said. It introduced multi-tenant model sharing in VCF 9.1, and plans to introduce object storage support and a set of automations to quickly spin up AI workloads. Both of those enhancements will also be released by the end of January (the company’s first quarter of fiscal 2027).
Freelance news writer Joab Jackson has been writing about back-end IT technologies for the past three decades. His grandfather programmed mainframes, and his father wrote computer games for hobbyist programming magazines in the 1980s.
