VMware has shifted to subscription licensing exclusively, has simplified the portfolio and has incorporated a CPU core licensing model. Broadcom has made significant changes to the pricing and does believe that in many cases pricing will be comparable. We will just have to run the numbers and see. And if you're looking for an update on Horizon or Carbon Black, I only know that we are continuing to transact both as normal. No new updates on those products yet.
So what are the potential impacts? There are going to be a large number of organizations that need to transition to different licensing models and different product sets. Let's start with the licensing. All organizations who have perpetual licenses will no longer be able to purchase support (SnS) as of the expiration date of their current support contract. The other type of change that we'll include here under licensing is the reduction of certain product alternatives. Organizations with subscription licensing for things like vSphere+, vSphere Enterprise, vSAN+ and VCF+, will need to transition to either VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) when their subscription expires where they will essentially receive vSphere Enterprise Plus in addition to other products. The only exception is for vSphere where there is an option to step down to vSphere Standard or Essentials Plus if that's a fit. Organizations with existing subscriptions for vSphere+, vSAN+ and VCF+ will receive license keys in the Customer Connect portal if not currently connected to Cloud Gateway. Broadcom is working on this process now.
Now for the products side. VMware has consolidated their offerings and bundled certain items together. This effects, for example, vSAN, NSX, SDDC Manager and SRM. vSAN is included in both VCF and VVF, NSX and SDDC Manager are wrapped into VMware Cloud Foundation, and SRM is an add-on product to either VCF or VVF. Below are Broadcom's VMware offerings that are part of this discussion. Note that there are no changes to hyperscaler/VMC offerings in the near future. You can see the discontinued and replacement products in this grid: https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/01/22/vmware-end-of-availability-of-perpetual-licensing-and-saas-services/ The below diagram simplifies the primary offerings around VCF and VVF.
VCF and VVF (VMware vSphere Foundation) licensing will be a prepaid commitment-based subscription in one-, three- and five-year terms. Note that Broadcom supports annual billing and co-terming. Going forward, organizations will need to provide the number of hosts, number of CPU's per host and the number of physical cores per CPU (excluding hyperthreading), with a minimum of 16 cores per CPU. vSAN customers will also now be licensed per Core per TiB, offering 1 TiB per Core withing VCF and 100 GiB within vSphere Foundation. Additional storage can be purchased through add-on's, with a minimum purchase of 8 TiB per CPU.
Note that Dell VxRail is currently excluded from all of these changes, as is Dell APEX VxRail licensing. The Dell-Broadcom VxRail agreement exists outside of all other OEM agreements and is not impacted. There are no changes to renewals or in the way we sell VxRail products today with VMware perpetual licenses.
If you need assistance with what information you need to obtain pricing or have questions on how your existing licenses fit into the model, please reach out to us!