vSphere Express: 128 Cores, Price vs. Proxmox VE

X (Twitter) Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn E-mail

Broadcom unveiled VMware vSphere Express on November 4, 2026, a vSphere 9 edition capped at 128 cores per customer with which VMware returns to offering basic virtualization to small environments, though with no official price published. The only visible figure comes from the channel: distributor TD SYNNEX sells it in the United States and Canada for $9,600 a year, an amount many SMBs and infrastructure providers are already comparing with Proxmox VE subscriptions, which do have public pricing.

vSphere Express in 20 seconds

Broadcom launched vSphere Express on 11/04/2026, a vSphere 9 edition for small environments.
It covers 128 cores per customer across all of that customer’s environments, in a single annual package with no expansion.
TD SYNNEX lists it at $9,600 in the U.S.; Broadcom doesn’t publish a price.
Proxmox VE Standard costs €550 per socket per year, without VAT.

The announcement comes after nearly three years of commercial changes that pushed away a large share of small customers. In February 2024, Broadcom withdrew the free version of ESXi and perpetual licenses, moving to a per-core subscription model. In March 2025, distributor Arrow told its partners in France that the minimum per order line would rise from 16 to 72 cores starting April 10, though days later German magazine iX reported that Broadcom had reversed course and kept the minimum at 16; a company spokesperson went as far as saying it had never announced a pricing change. In late 2025, VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) stopped being sold in some countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. That history explains why every licensing update is now read through the lens of cost, as already happened with the price hikes that pushed some companies toward Proxmox.

vSphere Express is also the concrete form of something Broadcom had been signaling since September, when it acknowledged it was preparing a simpler vSphere offering than VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). The final product has a different name and fairly closed terms.

What Broadcom has announced, and what it leaves to the channel

According to the official VCF blog, signed by Prashanth Shenoy, the division’s vice president of product marketing, vSphere Express is based on vSphere 9, is immediately available in every region, and targets customers with 128 cores across the whole of their environments. Broadcom lists five features: vMotion for live migration of virtual machines, high availability (HA, which automatically restarts failed machines), vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), vCenter Quick Patch for patching with less downtime, and support for TPM 2.0 and vTPM 2.0. TD SYNNEX’s listing adds that the package, with reference VCF-VSP-EXP, includes vCenter Standard and ESX.

Broadcom doesn’t publish what’s left out. German distributor Software Express does, citing the absence of DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler, automatic load balancing across hosts), Memory Tiering, SR-IOV, GPU and vGPU, Proactive HA, Live Patching, VCF Automation, and Private AI. vSAN also doesn’t appear among the announced features. Shenoy told The Register that each instance is independent, so they can’t be managed centrally, and that the product is meant for small deployments, not for environments with thousands of cores.

The commercial terms also come from the channel. Software Express states that a single package is sold per end customer, lasting one year with no expansions, and that the purchase isn’t final until Broadcom approves it. New customers can buy it, meaning those who have never bought VMware or haven’t done so in the last three years. For existing customers, Broadcom decides who is eligible, and that criteria hasn’t been published yet.

The sale happens through distributors’ marketplaces, in a two-tier scheme, because Broadcom cut its reseller network substantially. For cloud providers, the announcement doesn’t change the VCSP (VMware Cloud Service Provider) program: none of the sources consulted present vSphere Express as a license for providing services to third parties, and the one-package-per-end-customer rule points it toward self-use. Its effect on them is more indirect, since it competes for the same SMBs that today are weighing a move to a managed private cloud or to their own Proxmox cluster.

A price that depends on who’s selling it

Broadcom hasn’t given a figure. A spokesperson told The Register that vSphere Express will be sold as a per-core subscription, at a price clearly lower than VVF’s or VCF’s, and pointed to local resellers for pricing and terms. TD SYNNEX does show one: $9,600 for one year and 128 cores, equivalent to $75 per core as the suggested retail price, with a purchase form for the United States and Canada. In Germany, Software Express publishes an indicative price of €9,631.77 without VAT.

That’s where the first discrepancy shows up. Cloud Privado’s cost analysis converts the $9,600 at the European Central Bank’s reference rate for November 4 (1 euro to 1.1267 dollars) and arrives at roughly €8,520 a year. That’s a conversion, not a European rate: the euro price the German distributor publishes is about €1,100 higher, before VAT. What a Spanish company actually pays will depend on the distributor and the reseller.

The package is fixed, so the cost per core actually used rises the smaller the environment is. With 64 cores in use, the $9,600 works out to $150 per core; with 32, to $300. Cloud Privado also compares this with its own list-price estimates, roughly $55 per core for vSphere Standard and roughly $155 for VVF, and calculates that below about 62 cores, VVF would come out cheaper than Express. These are figures estimated from third-party sources, not official Broadcom rates, and VVF is no longer sold in some European countries.

For the European Economic Area (EEA), there’s an important nuance. Broadcom confirms in the same announcement that vSphere Standard 8 and vSphere Enterprise Plus 8 will remain on sale there until October 31, 2027, with extended support included in active subscriptions until their end date or until October 31, 2028, whichever comes first. A Spanish SMB already running vSphere Standard therefore has an alternative to Express for one more year, albeit on an earlier version of the platform.

Proxmox VE, the benchmark with public pricing

Proxmox Server Solutions charges per occupied CPU socket per year, regardless of the number of cores, and its prices are net. The Community subscription costs €120; Basic, €370 with three tickets a year; Standard, €550 with ten tickets and a four-hour first response for critical incidents; and Premium, €1,100 with unlimited tickets and a two-hour response. Every feature is available at every tier: the difference lies in support and access to the Enterprise repository. The software, licensed under AGPLv3, can also be used without a subscription.

The current version is Proxmox VE 9.2, released on May 21, 2026, which added dynamic load balancing with the Cluster Resource Scheduler (CRS) for HA-managed virtual machines. That’s the closest thing to DRS, the feature distributors say Express lacks. In August, the first version for arm64 servers also arrived.

With those rates, the math is simple for environments that fit within Express. Two single-socket servers on Proxmox VE Standard add up to €1,100 a year; three dual-socket servers, €3,300 (€2,220 on Basic); four dual-socket servers, €4,400. Only Premium on eight sockets, at €8,800, comes close to Express’s indicative German price. These figures don’t include the cost of migrating, training the team, or adapting backups and monitoring, something Cloud Privado’s own analysis says should be deducted. It also points to cases where VMware still makes sense: applications certified only for vSphere, teams with no time to redo their procedures, or integrations tied to existing storage arrays and contracts.

	VMware vSphere Express	Proxmox VE (Standard subscription)
Price	No official Broadcom rate. $9,600 a year at TD SYNNEX (U.S. and Canada); €9,631.77 without VAT, indicative, at Software Express (Germany)	€550 per socket per year, without VAT (Basic €370, Premium €1,100, Community €120)
Licensing unit	Fixed 128-core package per customer	Per occupied CPU socket, regardless of cores
Limit	128 cores across all of the customer’s environments, no expansion	No core limit
Features	ESX, vCenter Standard, vMotion, HA, VDS, vCenter Quick Patch, TPM 2.0 and vTPM 2.0. No DRS, SR-IOV, or GPU, according to distributors	Every feature at every tier: live migration, HA, dynamic balancing with CRS, Ceph and ZFS
Support	From Broadcom through the channel; terms not detailed publicly	10 tickets a year and a 4-hour first response for critical incidents
License	Proprietary, annual subscription subject to Broadcom’s approval	Open source (AGPLv3); the subscription is optional

The Register notes in its analysis that the reception will be mixed: many vSphere Standard users will welcome a more affordable upgrade option that doesn’t force them to learn another platform, while others, after the past few years’ experience, will be reluctant to recommit to Broadcom. For SMBs under 128 cores, the decision comes down to asking the distributor in writing for price and eligibility and comparing that, migration included, with the cost of a Proxmox VE cluster.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does VMware vSphere Express cost?

Broadcom hasn’t published a price. TD SYNNEX offers it in the United States and Canada for $9,600 a year ($75 per core), and German distributor Software Express gives an indicative price of €9,631.77 without VAT.

Can vSphere Express be expanded beyond 128 cores?

No. It’s a fixed 128-core package for all of the customer’s environments, one package per customer, with no expansions. For larger environments, distributors point to VVF or VCF.

Does vSphere Express include DRS or vSAN?

According to distributors, it doesn’t include DRS, and vSAN isn’t among the features Broadcom announced. It does include vMotion, high availability, Distributed Switch, vCenter Quick Patch, and TPM 2.0.

Is Proxmox VE cheaper than vSphere Express?

At public rates, Proxmox VE’s Standard subscription (€550 per socket per year without VAT) comes out cheaper in typical environments of up to 128 cores. That comparison doesn’t include the cost of migrating or training the team.

Sources:

This article is also available in Spanish: “VMware vuelve a la pyme con vSphere Express: 128 núcleos fijos frente a Proxmox”, on revistacloud.com.