VMware Per-Core Pricing vs Proxmox VE Renewal Savings

The 400-Dollar-Per-Core Era Is Here: Renewing VMware or Moving to Proxmox VE

The VMware per-core price increase effective July 31, 2026 removes the 32-core cap that kept your bill tied to socket count, and for a small two-node cluster it can turn a roughly $14,000 annual renewal into nearly $40,000. This post walks through exactly which cores you will be billed for, shows a real three-year renewal side by side with a Proxmox VE build, and gives you a TCO table you can fill in before your renewal clock runs out.

Key Takeaways

Removed cap. VMware no longer caps a license at 32 cores, so every physical core on every CPU now bills you.
Per-core math. A 96-core cluster that cost about $14,400 a year can land near $38,000 a year once the July 2026 increase and mandatory support are counted.
Oversubscription no longer helps. Paying per physical core means your vCPU-to-core ratio is irrelevant to the bill.
Proxmox is flat. A 2-node, 2-socket Proxmox VE subscription is about $700 a year regardless of how many cores you pack in.
Fill the table first. Pull your real core counts and renewal quote before the clock runs out, then compare.

What the July 31, 2026 per-core change actually means

Under VMware's old per-socket model, one vSphere license covered "up to 32 cores" of a processor. A 2x24-core node needed just two Enterprise Plus licenses, and your bill was driven by socket count, not by how many cores were actually packed inside. Broadcom removed that 32-core cap, so every physical core on every CPU is now billed individually.

On top of the cap removal, there was a 30% price increase effective December 1, 2024, and a further per-core adjustment effective July 31, 2026. vCenter Server moved to per-core pricing as well, and renewals are now processed through the Revenera portal instead of the old VMware sales flow.

The combined effect is that a moderately loaded cluster can see its renewal nearly triple, because you are paying for both more units (all the cores) and a higher per-unit price at the same time.

How to count the physical cores you'll be billed for

VMware bills physical cores on the host, not the vCPUs you assign to guests. That distinction matters because it means your oversubscription ratio is now purely a performance question, not a licensing one. Before you request a quote, pull the real core count from each node.

lscpu | grep -E 'Socket\(s\)|Core\(s\) per socket|Core\(s\) total'

Example output:

Socket(s):             2
Core(s) per socket:    24
Core(s) total:         48

Two nodes like this report 96 physical cores total, which is the number the new per-core bill is built on. To see what is actually running on those cores, list your VMs and their CPU assignments:

qm list

qm config 100 | grep -i '^cpu:'

If a node reports 48 cores but you only ever assign 24 vCPUs across all guests, the old model let you pay for 48 cores at socket pricing. The new model charges for all 48 cores at per-core pricing, so the load you put on the hardware no longer discounts your license.

Is a three-year renewal really going to double?

Let's run the numbers on a concrete small cluster: two nodes, each 2x24-core, vSphere Enterprise Plus, three-year term.

Under the old socket model:

$3,600 per socket (up to 32 cores)
2 sockets per node x 2 nodes = 4 licenses
$14,400 per year, or $43,200 over three years

Under the July 2026 per-core model, the effective all-in cost per physical core (license plus mandatory Support & Updates plus vCenter) lands near $400. That is the headline figure in the title.

# 96 physical cores x $400 all-in per core, per year
echo $(( 96 * 400 ))

That prints 38400, so the renewed cluster is roughly $38,400 a year, or about $115,200 over three years. The three-year delta versus the old model is close to $72,000. These figures are illustrative, so pull the exact per-core rate and support terms from your Revenera account; the final number depends on which Broadcom bundle you sit under and whether your reseller applies any volume adjustment.

VMware vs Proxmox VE: an honest 3-year TCO table

Here is the same cluster on Proxmox VE. The single biggest structural difference is that Proxmox VE subscription is priced per socket, flat, with no per-core multiplier and no cost added for the VMs you run on top of it.

Cost line item (3-year total)	VMware vSphere	Proxmox VE
Hypervisor licensing (96 physical cores)	~$115,200	$2,100
vCenter Server	included	built in, no cost
Backup server	separate Veeam/Commvault or PBS	Proxmox Backup Server (free)
Hardware (same two nodes)	same	same
Admin and automation effort	bundled in S&U	your time or scripts
Support	included in S&U	community + optional subscription

The Proxmox VE column's $2,100 comes from the per-socket subscription on a current Proxmox VE 8.x host:

# Two 2-socket nodes; one $350 license covers up to 3 sockets per node
echo $(( 2 * 350 * 3 ))

That prints 2100 for three years. A 2-socket node sits under the "up to 3 sockets" threshold, so each node needs a single $350 license. The moment you add a 4-socket node to the cluster, you pay for a second license on that node, which is the one Proxmox licensing detail that tends to bite people who are used to VMware's socket math.

Keep in mind this table isolates software cost. You still buy the same servers, switches, and disks under either hypervisor. The real savings is the licensing delta, and the real question is whether you are comfortable trading VMware's vendor ecosystem for Proxmox's open-source model.

The line items both sides hide

Licensing is only half the renewal. The other half is what you already spend and what you will keep spending.

Backup storage is a real line item on both sides. Under VMware people often pay extra for Veeam or Commvault; under Proxmox the equivalent is Proxmox Backup Server, which is free and open source with an optional subscription for the stable repository. If you are wiring up the backup side, Automated Backups with Proxmox Backup Server walks through the retention and scheduling setup.

# Authenticate to the Proxmox VE API, saving cookies to a jar
curl -sk -X POST "https://proxmox1:8006/api2/json/access/token" \
  --data username=root@pam \
  --data password='s3cret' \
  -c /tmp/pvecookies

# Create a snapshot-mode backup of two VMs to the PBS-backed storage
curl -sk -b /tmp/pvecookies \
  -X POST "https://proxmox1:8006/api2/json/storage/backup/add" \
  --data storage=pbs-local \
  --data dumpdir=/var/backups \
  --data vmid=100,101 \
  --data mode=snapshot \
  --data compress=zstd

Then there is the labor. Proxmox is cheaper on license but demands more hands-on work, so the honest tradeoff is time, not just dollars. You can compress that work with small scripts before it becomes a weekly chore. Automate Proxmox VE: Essential Scripts for Homelab Backups, Health Checks & VLANs covers the kind of automation that keeps a small cluster manageable without a dedicated VMware admin.

On a typical 10 GbE link a full backup of a 500 GB VM finishes in under an hour, and incremental backups of the same machine take just minutes, so the backup line item stays small either way. If your team lives in a GUI, Cockpit on Proxmox: Manage KVM, LXC, and Docker in One UI gives a browser-based console that covers KVM, LXC, and Docker without opening the Proxmox web UI for every task.

What to do before your renewal clock runs out

Give yourself a concrete timeline. VMware renewals through Revenera often open well before the anniversary date, and the quote you accept locks in the per-core rate for the whole term.

Run lscpu on every node and total the physical cores.
Pull the exact per-core rate, S&U terms, and vCenter pricing from the Revenera portal.
Fill in the TCO table above with your real numbers, not estimates.
Compare the three-year total against a Proxmox VE quote using the per-socket math.
Decide on a migration or a renewal before the window closes.

A realistic target is to have the numbers done at least 30 to 45 days before the renewal date, which leaves room to negotiate or to start a Proxmox pilot without a hard cutover deadline hanging over you.

Conclusion

The July 31, 2026 per-core increase turns socket-based VMware renewals into per-core bills that can nearly triple for a small cluster, and the three-year delta often lands in the tens of thousands. An honest TCO comparison puts that against Proxmox VE's flat per-socket subscription plus a free backup server, and the gap is usually large. Do the core count and pull the real Revenera quote first, then run the table before your renewal date arrives.