On the same day, VMware told The Register an updated vSphere Standard is coming and Proxmox confirmed 24/7 enterprise support from 19 October 2026. For anyone running basic server virtualisation, the licensing squeeze of the last three years is finally loosening at both ends.
What was announced
- VMware will release an updated version of vSphere Standard, its low-end server virtualisation bundle, which has not been significantly changed since the 2023 Broadcom acquisition.
- Paul Turner, chief product officer for VMware's Cloud Foundation Division, said the business unit has corrected the sales incentives that steered customers towards VMware Cloud Foundation, and that there had sometimes been too big a focus on VCF.
- The last major release of vSphere Standard was version 8 in 2022; vSphere 9 and VCF 9 shipped in 2025 without a new cut of vSphere Standard.
- Ram Velaga, president of Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Group, said vSphere Standard suits users running around 128 cores; Turner mentioned memory tiering as a possible feature.
- More detail on the new vSphere Standard, including route to market after Broadcom dropped the majority of its channel partners, is expected around VMware Explore in Germany in mid-October 2026.
- Proxmox begins 24/7 global enterprise support on 19 October 2026 for Premium subscribers, covering Proxmox Virtual Environment, Proxmox Backup Server and Proxmox Datacenter Manager; Standard subscribers join in a later Q4 2026 onboarding window and the Basic SLA is unchanged.
- Proxmox reports more than 2.3 million active Proxmox Virtual Environment servers worldwide.
- Proxmox VE subscription pricing starts at 370 euro per CPU socket per year for Basic, 550 euro for Standard and 1,100 euro for Premium.
- Proxmox has opened Proxmox North America Inc. in Kingston, Ontario, led by CEO Bill Hughes, with core engineering staying in Vienna.
The ETON view
The commercial point is that low-end virtualisation is contested again. For three years the practical choice for a small VMware estate was to accept a VCF-shaped renewal or migrate, and that pushed a lot of hosting providers and mid-sized enterprises into a platform change they did not budget for. A refreshed vSphere Standard aimed at roughly 128-core deployments, plus a Proxmox support model that finally covers a 3am production outage, means neither option is a leap of faith now.
What that changes on the hardware side is sizing. Velaga's 128-core figure is a licensing signal: if you are buying per socket, the cheapest estate is the one with the fewest, densest sockets, and a two-socket box with high core-count EPYC or Xeon consolidates what used to be four or six older hosts. Proxmox is priced per CPU socket too, from 370 euro up to 1,100 euro a year, so the same logic applies whichever way you go. The mistake we see is refreshing hardware to a legacy host count and then paying licence on sockets that exist only because the previous generation was slow.
Our advice is to decouple the two decisions. Do not let a renewal date set your hardware spec, and do not commit to a platform before mid-October when VMware says it will explain how the new vSphere Standard reaches market, which matters because most of the channel that used to sell it is gone. In the meantime, specify hosts that are platform-neutral: standard x86 two-socket servers with plenty of memory channels and NVMe run vSphere or Proxmox equally well, and keep your options open. We source those platforms new or certified refurbished, so a consolidation project can move at the pace of your licensing decision rather than a vendor's quarter.
Related infrastructure
Category: Servers · Vendor: VMware, Broadcom, Proxmox · Technology: vSphere Standard, VMware Cloud Foundation, Proxmox VE, Proxmox Backup Server · Last verified: 04 Sep 2026 · ~3 min read
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