On 2 September, at VMware Explore, two senior Broadcom executives said there will be a new version of vSphere Standard. Not from the stage: in interviews on the sidelines, because a journalist asked. There was no keynote and no press release, and there is no price, no release date and no feature list. For companies that have spent years paying for VMware while using almost none of what they bought, that corridor conversation is the story of the year. And that is how they found out about it.
We are not VMware resellers, nor Proxmox resellers: we don't sell anyone's licences. We have migrated companies from VMware to Proxmox and we have also recommended staying put when that made sense. What follows is how we read an announcement like this before it goes into a budget, with the precedent of the last time Broadcom changed the rules for the low end sitting right in front of us.
What was said, who said it and where
The two names are Paul Turner, chief product officer of the VMware Cloud Foundation division, and Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group. Turner acknowledged that the focus on VCF—the big bundle, VMware Cloud Foundation—had been too great, and that sales staff were incentivised in a way that pushed customers towards it. On that he said three words: "We corrected this".
Velaga added the why: the VCF focus was there to counter the narrative that public cloud was superior, and releasing the low-end product at the same time could have distracted customers. He also put a number on the new Standard's intended audience: environments of around 128 cores. Turner mentioned memory tiering as a possible feature—the vSphere 9 piece that lets NVMe stand in for RAM—and said details would likely emerge when Explore reaches Germany in mid-October. That Explore on Tour date in Frankfurt is 13 and 14 October.
The interesting part is how everyone found out. The Register published it first and noted it was not said on stage but in one-to-one interviews; heise, picking it up the next day, finished the thought: no official announcement, no keynote, no press release, no blog post. The gap this product would fill is a long one: the last substantial version of vSphere Standard is 8, from 2022, predating Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. When vSphere 9 and VCF 9 shipped in 2025, no new Standard came with them. Four years with no new product in that segment.
128 cores: where Broadcom draws the line for "small"
Velaga said "around 128 cores". That is a description of who they are aiming at, not a licensing cap. Translated into hardware it produces a very specific number, and it is worth working out with a pencil:
That band is the estate of a company of fifty to three hundred people: two or three dual-socket boxes, a UPS underneath and a cabinet in a room with shelving next to it. That is where most of our work is. And that profile has spent four years renewing the subscription of a platform whose development was going, by stated decision, into a bundle it cannot and does not want to buy.
We already know how change gets communicated in this segment
On 28 March 2025 a screenshot was published of an email the distributor Arrow had sent to VMware partners in France. It said the minimum number of cores required for VMware licences would rise "substantially, from 16 to 72 cores per command line"—a calque of the French for order line—effective 10 April 2025. The example that came with the story speaks for itself: a server with a single eight-core processor would have had to pay for 72; sixty-four cores of unusable software. The same report noted a 20% uplift for anyone not renewing before their subscription anniversary date.
Then 10 April arrived. That same day it emerged that the minimum was staying at 16 and the increase would not be applied. How did that come out? A distributor confirmed it to iX magazine and a revised reseller price list appeared. Broadcom did not respond officially to questions about the reversal, and published no reason either. Thirteen days from one extreme to the other, with no public company document—then or now—supporting either position.
What repeats is not the product: it is the channel
The increase arrived through a distributor email. The reversal, through a revised price list. And now the good news arrives through an interview on the sidelines of a conference. What repeats—and this is our own reading—is the form, not the direction: at all three moments, when it came time to sign, there was no piece of paper to hold on to.
A product is something you can plan around: it has a version, a date and a roadmap. A commercial channel policy is something you endure. And when you sign three years of subscription you are buying that policy as much as the hypervisor, which had been working for a good while before any of this anyway. The question that is useful in a budget meeting is what document you will be holding the day it changes again.
What we are not going to tell you
That this is a reason to migrate. It is not. If the new vSphere Standard ships at a sensible price and with the vSphere 9 pieces, then for a shop with two servers and staff who have spent ten years in vCenter it may well be the right answer: fewer moving parts and less retraining. We already wrote about when NOT to migrate from VMware to Proxmox and we have not changed our minds over a headline. What we do say is: don't put it in a budget until it has a part number and a price.
On the same day, Proxmox announced a North American subsidiary and 24/7 enterprise support starting 19 October. Asked about it, Turner said their offering will be "better and more resilient" than Proxmox, and pointed to that support launch as a sign that Proxmox lags on maturity. He has a point: a support organisation that is just starting is not one that has been running for twenty years, and you feel the difference at three in the morning. That said, the maturity of a support contract is measured in written commitments—we wrote it this very morning, looking at what a 24/7 contract actually buys you—and on that count neither side has shown the paperwork yet.
Six things you can do before 13 October
- 1Write down your subscription anniversary date and set a reminder ninety days out. In 2025 that distributor email mentioned a 20% uplift for renewing late. We do not know whether that condition still applies today, and that is precisely why it is worth treating as if it did.
- 2Count your cores for real: sockets times cores per socket, server by server, including the one sitting powered off in the rack just in case. It is a two-minute calculation and it tells you whether you are inside or outside the band Broadcom is describing. If you have never done it, the number tends to be higher than you remember.
- 3Ask for whatever you are going to sign in writing: part number, price per core, minimum order, term, and what happens at the next renewal. This is not suspicion, it is the same standard we apply to any support contract: if they cannot put it in writing, it does not exist.
- 4Do not sign three years to wait for something with no date, and do not migrate in three weeks because of a headline. Both decisions are made with a calendar in front of you, not a feed. If your contract expires in January you have time to watch Frankfurt; if it expires in October you do not, and that is the relevant piece of information.
- 5Have the exit measured, even if you never intend to use it. How many virtual machines, how many terabytes and how many maintenance windows, and what breaks along the way: backups, monitoring, agents, virtual desktops. Without that number, the other side sets the terms of the renewal.
- 6If your decision depends on Frankfurt, write it down with a condition and a date: "if there is no public price by 20 October, we do X". A plan that depends on a third party speaking is only a plan once it has an expiry date.
None of this requires choosing between platforms today. It requires having your own numbers before somebody shows you theirs. It is the same thing we say about hardware: failure is inevitable, an outage is a design decision. With vendors it works the same way. Depending on one is inevitable, because you have to virtualise on something; being left without a measured alternative is a decision you made yourself, usually without noticing, the day you signed without looking at the calendar.
13 October
In Frankfurt there may be a price and a part number, or there may be another corridor conversation. We will be watching, and if anything with a number comes out we will write it up here with the arithmetic done, as we did with the end of the bundled cloud licence or with Proxmox VE 8 going end of support.
In the meantime there are two numbers in this story you already have at home, and neither depends on anyone else speaking: the date your contract expires and the number of cores you are paying for.
Sources: the statements by Paul Turner (chief product officer of the VMware Cloud Foundation division) and Ram Velaga (president of Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group) were published by The Register on 2 September 2026, from one-to-one interviews on the sidelines of VMware Explore (link): that is the source of "We corrected this", the acknowledgement that sales staff were incentivised towards VCF, the mention of memory tiering, the "around 128 cores" environments, the Proxmox comparison and the note that details would likely emerge when Explore reaches Germany in mid-October. heise online picked it up on 3 September 2026 (link) and adds that there was no official announcement, keynote, press release or blog post, the Frankfurt Explore on Tour dates (13 and 14 October) and that the last substantial vSphere Standard release is version 8, from 2022, with no new Standard when vSphere 9 and VCF 9 shipped in 2025. The Arrow distributor email to VMware partners in France ("from 16 to 72 cores per command line", effective 10 April 2025), the eight-core server example and the 20% uplift for renewing after the anniversary date: The Register, 28 March 2025 (link). The 10 April 2025 reversal keeping the 16-core minimum, confirmed by a distributor to iX magazine and reflected in a revised reseller price list, with no official Broadcom response: heise online, 10 April 2025 (link). Proxmox's North American subsidiary and 24/7 support from 19 October 2026: covered in our post from this morning, with its own sources. What we do not claim: there is no price, part number, availability date or feature list for the new vSphere Standard, because none has been published; we do not know whether the 20% late-renewal uplift is still in force in 2026; and the reading of the communication pattern is ours, not a fact stated by anyone.
How many cores are you paying for, and what would leaving cost?
We count your cores, your machines and your maintenance windows, and hand you in writing what staying costs and what migrating costs. We sell nobody's licences, so the arithmetic comes out the same whatever you decide.
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