VMware by Broadcom lifts storage allowances and prices for vSphere Foundation

This will both ease and exacerbate price concerns and competitive sniping

VMware by Broadcom has upped the storage capacity allowed under licenses for its vSphere Foundation bundle – a move that addresses competitors' attacks, but may also give them new impetus.

vSphere Foundation (VVF) includes VMware's ESXi hypervisor, VSAN storage, the vCenter virtual machine manager, the Tanzu container platform, and elements of the Aria management and automation suite. The bundle is positioned as simpler than Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware's private cloud stack, but far more comprehensive than the vSphere Standard (VVS) package that focuses on server virtualization.

When Broadcom changed VMware's licenses to subscriptions and per-core pricing, it included a limit of 100 GiB of storage capacity per core for vSphere Foundation. For some users, that meant substantial increases in storage costs because they needed to license more cores to cover the data they stored in VSANs.

The virtualization giant's rivals have used lower storage costs as their opening gambit when promoting their wares as VMware alternatives.

VMware has now changed the per-core capacity to 250 GiB, which may blunt those attacks. At the same time it's increased the price of vSphere Foundation by 11 percent to reflect the increased storage capacity.

The vendor told The Register that the increased storage allowance would "give our customers a more powerful and valuable enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure solution for running VMs and containers with IT infrastructure optimization."

Users will doubtless need to revisit their cost-crunching spreadsheets to understand the impact of this change.

Another change Broadcom brought to VMware was reducing its products to just three: VCF, VVF, and VVS.

But on Thursday it added another: VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus. That bundle adds features including VM encryption, the vSphere Distributed Switch, and Storage DRS tools that allow users to decouple VMs from storage devices.

Those additions will help orgs with more than a handful of VMs to manage their fleets, and will likely be welcome. ®