VMware vSAN (now marketed as vSAN 8 under Broadcom) is the hyperconverged storage layer used by hundreds of thousands of enterprises worldwide. Its inclusion in VCF is one of the key selling points of the bundle — but the shift from per-socket perpetual to per-core subscription has dramatically increased costs for many organisations, and vSAN Max introduces a new architectural model with its own pricing implications. This guide explains everything.
VMware vSAN was one of the defining products in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) market segment that emerged in the mid-2010s. The original vSAN licensing model was straightforward by comparison to where it sits today: organisations purchased vSAN licences per CPU socket on a perpetual basis, with annual SnS (Support and Subscription) providing ongoing updates and support. vSAN came in four editions — Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus — each with progressively more advanced storage features, and the per-socket price reflected the edition tier.
The perpetual model worked well for organisations with stable infrastructure investments. A 10-node cluster with dual-socket servers might require 20 vSAN Enterprise licence sockets, purchased once with a three-year support plan — predictable, long-term cost visibility. Organisations could right-size their storage capabilities to match their workload profiles without paying for unnecessary premium features.
Under Broadcom's new model following the 2023 acquisition, vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone perpetual product for new purchases. All vSAN deployments — whether standalone or part of VCF — are now subscription-based and priced per physical core, not per socket. This represents a fundamental shift in the commercial structure and has cascading cost implications for most organisations. For full context on the broader Broadcom VMware licensing restructuring, see our Broadcom VMware Licensing Guide.
Pre-acquisition vSAN perpetual licences, while still technically valid, cannot be renewed. Organisations with existing vSAN perpetual licences face a forced transition to subscription when their SnS expires, converting to per-core pricing at that point. For many organisations, the subscription cost is significantly higher than the perpetual+SnS model over equivalent multi-year periods.
While vSAN has shifted to subscription licensing, the technical feature differentiation between editions remains relevant — primarily to understand what capabilities you actually need versus what you're being forced to pay for within the VCF bundle. vSAN 8 (the current release under Broadcom) maintains the four-tier edition structure, though the practical availability of lower tiers has narrowed considerably.
| vSAN Edition | Key Capabilities | Included in VCF? | Typical Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|
| vSAN Standard | Basic HCI storage, RAID-5/6 erasure coding, disk deduplication | No | Cost-optimised general-purpose HCI clusters |
| vSAN Advanced | Standard + compression, stretched clusters, encryption at rest | No | Organisations requiring data protection and multi-site replication |
| vSAN Enterprise | Advanced + HCI mesh, file services, iSCSI target, RAID-1 | No | Mixed workload environments needing advanced storage services |
| vSAN Enterprise Plus | Enterprise + vSAN Max capabilities, disaster recovery, analytics | Yes (all VCF) | VCF deployments, storage-intensive workloads, disaster recovery |
| vSAN Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) | Scaled-down HCI for small sites, 3-node clusters, basic replication | Transitioning | Remote offices, branch locations, disaster recovery sites |
The fundamental commercial problem for organisations is this: if you purchase vSAN on a standalone subscription basis or as part of VCF, you get Enterprise Plus capabilities. You cannot meaningfully purchase or upgrade to a lower edition once Broadcom has moved the standard offering to subscription. For organisations that genuinely only need Standard or Advanced capabilities — and do not need the vSAN Max disaggregation, disaster recovery, or advanced analytics features included in Enterprise Plus — this represents a forced upgrade at significantly higher cost.
vSAN Max, introduced in vSAN 8, represents a fundamental architectural departure from traditional vSAN hyperconverged model. Where standard vSAN requires compute and storage to be co-located on the same hosts (hyperconverged), vSAN Max allows organisations to disaggregate storage into dedicated storage-only nodes while keeping compute-only nodes separate. This architectural flexibility is valuable for workloads with highly imbalanced compute-to-storage ratios — for example, data warehouse environments with high storage density but relatively modest compute requirements, or AI/ML workloads that accumulate large datasets but use intermittent burst compute.
The vSAN Max capability set is included in Enterprise Plus edition, but vSAN Max introduces additional subscription costs. When deploying vSAN Max, organisations pay not only for the standard vSAN Enterprise Plus per-core pricing across all nodes, but also a separate vSAN Max addon subscription that applies to storage-only nodes. The practical implication is that a disaggregated vSAN Max cluster is more expensive than an equivalent hyperconverged vSAN Standard or Advanced cluster because the storage-only nodes are charged at Enterprise Plus per-core rates plus the vSAN Max addon.
For organisations considering vSAN Max to support storage-heavy workloads, evaluate whether the storage disaggregation benefit (avoiding overprovisioned compute hardware, simplifying scaling) justifies the additional subscription cost versus deploying a purpose-built external SAN or object storage platform. Many organisations find that pure hyperconverged vSAN is not economical for storage-dominant workloads, and vSAN Max adds cost on top of that. This is an area where specialist advisory typically identifies significant savings opportunities through workload re-profiling.
vSAN Enterprise Plus is bundled as a standard component of all VCF subscriptions — there is no VCF tier that excludes vSAN. This creates significant commercial friction for organisations that deploy VCF for compute and networking (vSphere + NSX) but use external SAN or NAS storage rather than vSAN for data persistence. In these scenarios, the organisation is paying for vSAN capabilities across the entire VCF-licenced core count, even though no workloads are actually using vSAN storage.
The cost implication is substantial. For a 20-node cluster with dual 16-core processors (320 total cores), the vSAN component of VCF represents approximately 25–30% of the total VCF per-core cost. If that organisation is not using vSAN, the effective per-core cost of VCF is significantly higher than the blended cost of the components actually used (vSphere + NSX).
This is one of the critical negotiation points in any VCF commercial discussion: if your environment uses external storage, challenge the necessity of vSAN inclusion and explore whether standalone vSphere subscription plus NSX subscription (whether part of VCF or purchased separately) represents better economics than forced-bundle VCF. Some Broadcom account teams will agree to negotiate this scenario with detailed technical justification of storage non-use.
Like vSphere, vSAN has transitioned from per-socket licensing to per-core subscription. The counting methodology is identical to vSphere — all physical cores on vSAN nodes are counted, with a minimum count of 16 cores per CPU socket. This creates a significant cost increase for organisations with older hardware or non-optimally-sized infrastructure.
Consider a concrete example: a 10-node vSAN cluster running on older generation hardware with dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-2690 v4 processors (12 cores per socket, so 24 cores per node). Under the old perpetual model, this cluster would be licensed with 10 vSAN sockets (5 pairs of sockets per node × 10 nodes), requiring 5 perpetual vSAN Enterprise licences at perhaps £8,000 per socket, or £40,000 initial purchase with perhaps £8,800 annual SnS (22% rate). Over three years, total cost would be approximately £66,400 (£40,000 + 3 × £8,800).
Under the new per-core subscription model, the same 10-node cluster is counted at 240 total cores (24 cores per node × 10 nodes), with a per-core annual subscription cost for vSAN Enterprise Plus within VCF of approximately £42 per core per year. Over three years, the cost would be approximately £30,240 (240 cores × £42 × 3 years) — a reduction in this specific case. However, the comparison changes dramatically with modern hardware. A 10-node cluster running dual-socket Intel Xeon 6430 processors (32 cores per socket, so 64 cores per node) under per-core pricing is counted at 640 cores, generating three-year VCF costs substantially higher than the old perpetual licensing model would have been.
| Scenario | vSAN per-Core Count | Old Perpetual+SnS (3yr) | New vSAN Subscription (3yr) | Cost Delta |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10-node cluster, older hardware (E5 12c/socket) | 240 cores | £66,400 | £30,240 | −54% savings |
| 10-node cluster, modern hardware (6430 32c/socket) | 640 cores | £66,400 | £80,640 | +21% increase |
| 20-node cluster, modern hardware (6430 32c/socket) | 1,280 cores | £132,800 | £161,280 | +21% increase |
The practical implication: organisations with modern, high-core-count servers face significant cost increases when transitioning from perpetual to subscription vSAN licensing. This is a core negotiation point — demonstrating the cost impact of the transition and using it as leverage to negotiate volume discounts or alternative commercial structures.
vSAN stretched clusters — where a single vSAN datastore is stretched across two geographically separated sites with a witness appliance at a third location for quorum — require vSAN Advanced edition or higher at both sites. The witness appliance itself is not separately licenced; it is management overhead. However, all compute nodes at both the primary and secondary sites are counted toward the vSAN per-core licence scope. For organisations deploying vSAN stretched clusters for disaster recovery or geographic redundancy, this means licensing vSAN across both active sites at full cost — there is no per-site or secondary-site discount in the subscription pricing structure.
vSAN Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) licensing is a distinct SKU designed for small remote locations — typically 3-node clusters with a maximum cluster size of 6 nodes. ROBO was historically significantly cheaper than standard vSAN per-socket licensing for small distributed sites. However, ROBO has been de-emphasised under Broadcom's new subscription model. New ROBO subscriptions are available but at per-core rates comparable to standard vSAN, eliminating the economic advantage that made ROBO attractive for small sites. Organisations with multiple small remote sites should evaluate whether standalone vSAN subscription or alternative HCI platforms (Nutanix, Simplivity) remain economical in this scenario.
Broadcom's shift to per-core subscription pricing and forced bundling within VCF has opened commercial conversations with vSAN alternatives that were previously difficult to justify against vSAN's installed base and tight ESXi integration. The main storage alternatives in 2026 are:
Pure Storage FlashArray: Pure's all-flash SAN platform provides enterprise storage with advanced data reduction and management capabilities. For organisations with workloads requiring high I/O performance or non-virtualised systems requiring SAN access, Pure FlashArray is a credible alternative to vSAN. Pure's per-GB pricing model (or capacity subscription) can be economically superior to vSAN subscription for specific workload profiles — particularly organisations with consolidated storage serving both virtualised and non-virtualised environments.
NetApp ONTAP: NetApp's ONTAP storage platform (available on-premises and cloud-deployed) provides NAS and SAN capabilities with strong data protection and disaster recovery features. ONTAP clusters can serve vSphere via iSCSI or NFS, eliminating the need for vSAN while providing equivalent (or superior) reliability and feature richness. NetApp's subscription licensing model is based on capacity rather than hypervisor cores, which changes the cost dynamics significantly for large environments.
Nutanix AOS with Nutanix Clusters: Organisations migrating away from VMware to Nutanix AHV benefit from Nutanix's integrated HCI stack, which includes Nutanix Clusters (the Nutanix equivalent of vSAN). For organisations already committed to Nutanix or evaluating HCI alternatives, Nutanix Clusters pricing is inclusive in the Nutanix subscription and eliminates the separate vSAN cost line item entirely.
AWS/Azure SAN Services: For workloads with cloud-first architectures or hybrid cloud strategies, AWS EBS, Azure Managed Disks, or Azure NetApp Files provide cloud-native storage without on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure requirements. The economics are highly workload-dependent, but for burst or non-persistent storage needs, cloud storage can significantly outperform on-premises vSAN economics.
Ceph / Open-source storage: For organisations with strong DevOps engineering teams, open-source storage platforms like Ceph provide cost-minimal storage infrastructure. Ceph does not have the operational tooling or support ecosystem of vSAN, but for organisations capable of operating open-source infrastructure, Ceph can eliminate vSAN licensing costs entirely.
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