Walk into almost any bank, hospital, telecom or government data center in 2026 and you will find VMware running underneath. Think of it like the electricity wiring in an old, well-built office. Newer buildings use different wiring, people argue about whether it is the best choice, and the bill went up sharply last year. But ripping it out of a working building is slow, risky and expensive, so it stays. That single fact explains most of what you are about to read.
Over the last fifteen parts you learned what a hypervisor is, how ESXi and vCenter work, how a VM is built, and how vMotion, HA and DRS keep things running. This part zooms out. The technology you learned has not gone anywhere. What changed is who owns it, how you buy it, and which companies are now shopping around. A fresher who understands that change sounds a lot smarter in an interview than one who only memorised features.
The one thing that actually changed: who owns VMware
VMware was an independent company for most of its life. In late 2023 it was acquired by Broadcom, a large semiconductor and software firm. Since then the products carry the name VMware by Broadcom, and you will see Broadcom branding inside the vSphere Client, the ESX console and the installer. Nothing about a VM, a datastore or a vSwitch behaves differently because of this. The plumbing you studied is the same.
What changed is the business model around it, and that is the part that reaches your job. Broadcom decided to sell fewer products, stop selling permanent licenses, and charge by the core. Each of those is worth understanding on its own, so let us take them one at a time.
The 2026 product map, in plain English
VMware used to sell a confusing wall of products, well over a hundred SKUs. Broadcom cut that down to a short list. As a fresher you only need to recognise four names and roughly what each one means.
| Bundle | Short name | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| VMware Cloud Foundation | VCF | The full private cloud: vSphere plus vSAN storage, NSX networking and the management tooling, run as one platform. |
| vSphere Foundation | VVF | vSphere with some extras, for companies that want a strong virtualization platform but not the whole cloud stack. |
| vSphere Enterprise Plus | VSEP | Classic vSphere with the advanced features like DRS, sold on its own. |
| vSphere Standard | VVS | The entry tier of vSphere for smaller setups. |
The current versions are vSphere, ESXi and vCenter 9, which ship inside VCF and VVF 9. One change you will notice fast: the old labels like Update 2 or U3b are gone. Everything now uses a single version number shared across the components, such as 9.0.0.0, then maintenance releases like 9.0.2.0, then the next minor release 9.1.0.0. The most recent release at the time of writing is the 9.1 generation, announced in 2026.
The licensing shift every fresher should understand
This is the part that put VMware in the news. Two changes matter. First, you can no longer buy a permanent license. Since early 2024 it is subscription only, sold in one, three or five year terms. When the term ends, you renew or you stop. Second, you pay per CPU core, not per physical CPU socket the way it used to work.
The 16-core rule that catches people out
Here is the non-obvious default that trips up newcomers. Under the subscription model each CPU is licensed at a minimum of 16 cores, even if the physical chip has fewer. So if you put a 12 core CPU in a host, you still pay for 16. There was also a brief attempt in early 2025 to set a much higher 72 core minimum per order, which caused enough anger from customers that it was pulled back within weeks. The 16 core per CPU minimum is the one that actually stands.
Gotcha
Buying CPUs with very few cores no longer saves on VMware licensing, because of the 16 core floor per CPU. Teams now think harder about fewer hosts with bigger CPUs, which is exactly the kind of trade you should be able to explain.
Worked example
Say you consolidate 10 old physical servers onto 2 new hosts, which is the whole point of virtualization from Part 1. Each new host has 2 CPUs, and each CPU has 24 cores.
Cores to license = 2 hosts × 2 CPUs × 24 cores = 96 cores.
Every core is above the 16 core minimum, so nothing rounds up here. You pay for 96 cores of whichever bundle the company chose.
Now compare a host with a single 8 core CPU: you would still be billed for 16 cores on that CPU. Same workload, worse deal. That is the number to keep in your head.
Where VMware still wins, and where it is losing ground
Here is my honest opinion, and it cuts against both loud camps. The people saying VMware is dead are wrong. The people saying nothing has changed are also wrong. The truth is duller and more useful: VMware is still the default for large, mixed, mission critical workloads, and it is genuinely losing the small and cost sensitive end of the market.
Once a company has hundreds of VMs, vMotion, HA, DRS and years of operational habit built around vCenter, moving away is a multi year project that risks the business. Most large shops stay and pay. Smaller companies, labs and teams that mainly run Linux are the ones actually leaving, because for them the switch is cheap and the savings are real. Industry analysts expect a meaningful slice of workloads, on the order of a third, to move to other platforms over the next few years. A third leaving also means most stay.
| Platform | Best fit | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| VMware vSphere / VCF | Large, mixed, critical estates that need the full feature set | Subscription cost |
| Nutanix AHV | Companies wanting a mature, supported VMware-like replacement | Cost is closer to old VMware than to free |
| Proxmox VE | Small business, labs, open-source teams | You lean on community support and your own skills |
| Microsoft Hyper-V | Windows-heavy shops already paying for Windows Server | Less ideal for non-Windows-centric estates |
In practice
Plenty of companies are not choosing one or the other. They keep VMware for the critical estate and stand up Proxmox or Hyper-V for test, dev and low risk workloads to trim the bill. If your first job involves "moving some VMs off vSphere," this is usually what it means, not a full rip and replace.
What this all means for your career
The skills do not expire. A live migration is a live migration whether the button says vMotion, Nutanix or Proxmox. Shared storage, clustering, snapshots, resource scheduling: every platform has its own version of the same ideas you learned here. That is why I tell freshers to go deep on VMware fundamentals first, then pick up one alternative, usually Proxmox because it is free to run at home. Understanding two platforms makes the concepts click, and it makes you useful to a company sitting on the fence.
If you want to push past the fresher level later, the advanced side of the platform is worth a look once the basics are solid. The deep VMware Cloud Foundation 9 guide and the VCF Automation guide cover where this goes for experienced engineers. For now, stay with the fundamentals.
A simple plan to stay employable
You do not need to learn everything at once. A plan I have watched work for new engineers looks like this. Spend your first stretch getting fluent on vSphere: build a nested ESXi host at home, add it to a vCenter, create a VM, take a snapshot, run a vMotion. The earlier parts of this series map straight onto that. Once those motions feel boring, you know the fundamentals have stuck.
Then add one alternative. Install Proxmox VE on an old laptop or inside a VM, create a guest, and find its version of the things you already know: its live migration, its snapshots, its clustering. You will notice the names differ but the ideas are identical. That single comparison teaches you more than another month of VMware-only study, because it separates the concept from the brand.
Finally, learn to read the market in plain terms. When a job ad lists vSphere, vCenter and vSAN, that is a full VMware shop and probably a stable estate. When it lists VMware alongside Proxmox, Nutanix or Hyper-V, that company is mid-transition and will value someone comfortable on both sides. Neither is better. Knowing which one you are walking into is the skill.
Real interview question
"Given the Broadcom changes, is it still worth learning VMware?"
Answer with balance, not a slogan. Say that VMware still runs the majority of large enterprise data centers, so the skills are in demand and will be for years, but that the licensing changes have pushed some companies toward Nutanix, Proxmox and Hyper-V, so you are also learning one alternative. That answer shows you read the market instead of just following hype. Interviewers remember the candidate who can argue both sides.
Try it yourself
On any ESXi host you can reach, including a free nested one in VMware Workstation, open the host shell and run vmware -v. It prints the exact ESXi build. Now find that build on the official Broadcom build-number page and map it to its unified VCF version, for example a 9.0.x build belonging to a 9.0 release.
You got it right if you can say, in one sentence, which VCF release your host belongs to and whether a newer one exists. That is a real task a junior gets handed in their first month before a patch cycle.
FAQ
Is VMware going away?
No. It is still the most widely deployed platform in large data centers, and it keeps shipping new releases. What changed is the price and the way you buy it, which is pushing some smaller users to alternatives. The core product is very much alive.
Should a fresher learn VMware or an alternative like Proxmox?
Start with VMware because most enterprise jobs still ask for it, then add Proxmox at home since it is free. The concepts transfer both ways, so you are not choosing one forever. Knowing two platforms is a real advantage in interviews.
Can I still get a free or cheap copy to practice on?
VMware Workstation is available for personal learning and lets you run nested ESXi, which is enough to practice everything in this series. You do not need a paid subscription to build a home lab and learn the fundamentals.
Why did VMware switch to per-core licensing?
Modern CPUs pack many cores into one socket, so charging per socket no longer matched how much computing a host actually delivers. Per-core pricing ties the bill to capacity. It also, conveniently for the vendor, raises the price for dense modern servers, which is why it drew complaints.
How big does one VMware setup get?
To show this is not a platform standing still, look at the scale numbers Broadcom published with the 2026 VCF 9.1 release. A single instance can now manage up to 5,000 ESXi hosts, double the previous limit, and it can upgrade as many as 256 clusters in parallel during a maintenance window. You will not touch numbers like that as a fresher, and that is exactly the point. The platform you are learning still gets serious engineering investment, so the hours you put into the fundamentals are not being spent on something quietly winding down. That is worth remembering the next time someone tells you VMware is finished.
References
- VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog: vSphere Foundation 9.0 announcement
- Broadcom News: VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 announcement
- Broadcom Knowledge: Build numbers and versions of VMware ESXi/ESX
About The Author
DrJha