VMware VCF Minimum Cores Purchases Changes

As per the article and confirmation from email from Broadcom to all their partners, there will be a minimum purchase for New VCF license purchase for new order starting 10th April 2025. 

What will be your impact to customers like yourself? Basically for any new project, a minimal purchase of 72 cores license is required whether or not your compute workload is going to be lesser. This does not change the minimum purchase of 16 cores per CPU which still stand.

While that is true, the above statement only applies to new purchase, if you are doing expansion or renewal of licenses, this does not change.

So if you really just need a small setup using 3 servers each, taking a supported Dell PowerEdge R350 with vSphere 8.0U3 as per VMware site, with a minimum of 8 cores per CPU, you will need 24 cores license which will have a surplus of 48 cores (72-24). That is a bumper.

For the above example, this will be wastage. However, as I mentioned, expansion and renewal are not impacted. 

In another scenario, if you have multiple remote sites each with the same setup above, instead of treating it as a new project each, you can cluster them as one project, purchase a minimum purchase of 72 cores and use 24 cores of it. Add on servers for other sites as expansion which does not need a minimum and utilize the remaining 24 cores. Moving forward a more proper planning to optimize your license purchase is definitely required instead of loosely buying them in the past.

This will be something to consider which means you will need to plain way ahead when you are just looking at a small project, think if you will be expanding or not to treat it as a one big project for a purchase so that you can minimize your wastage and utilize your license at full.

One thing to note that if you need more capacity of storage using the above example on VCF 24 cores, you are entitled to 24 TiB of capacity. If you need more licenses for VMware vSAN, each vSAN add-on license will set you an additional $210 per TiB.

The question will be, if you need more capacity, does it provide enough performance and data management with protection capability? Is vSAN sufficient to fulfil those requirements with the cost? If not, how much more other solutions add on. Or can it be really be met?

You might want to consider moving to 2-tier architecture by using an external storage such as NetApp ASA. This not only allows your to separate out your management domain supported in VCF 9.0 to avoid operation overheads and have availability outside of the virtual platform.

NetApp ASA is designed for block protocol and suitable for VMware environment which not only provide the storage requirement in capacity but also performance and data management with protection, running the renowed ONTAP. 

Did I also mention performance and data availability of six 9's guaranteed? No drivers installation and getting full symmetric active-active path which only found in high end storage. Trust me, I couldn't believe it myself untill I am in NetApp. Dont't let me tell you, go check it out yourself.