VMware wants to win back small customers and is working on a new version of vSphere Standard, following years of focus on the costly VMware Cloud Foundation.
Since the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom in 2023, small businesses have been pushed aside. The focus has since been primarily on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and large customers. That now seems to be changing after several years. A new version of vSphere Standard is reportedly in the works, according to Paul Turner, CPO for VMware by Broadcom’s Cloud Foundation Division, speaking to The Register. The previous release dates back to 2022.
vSphere Standard
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware disrupted plans primarily for small organizations. Since the takeover, the focus has been on the expensive VMware Cloud Foundation aimed at large enterprises. Small businesses feel sidelined.
One man’s loss is another man’s gain. Competitor Proxmox positioned itself in 2024 as the successor to the discontinued free ESXi. The company offers clustering, live migration, high availability, a web interface, and shared storage—the same set covered by vSphere Standard—for the same environments of a handful of hosts. Consequently, many customers made the switch quickly, such as Veeam.
VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is Broadcom’s integrated private cloud platform that bundles compute (vSphere), storage (vSAN), network virtualization (NSX), and cloud management (Aria) into a single software stack, allowing companies to deploy and manage a full private cloud across their own data centers.
Since Broadcom acquired VMware, the offering has been simplified into a few subscription packages, with VCF as the flagship solution, featuring a licensing model charged per core with a minimum purchase requirement. This is precisely why it targets large enterprises: the licensing costs, required scale, and complexity of managing a complete private cloud are only worthwhile when an organization runs dozens to hundreds of servers and wants to modernize its own data center infrastructure, whereas smaller companies are generally better off with public cloud or lighter virtualization solutions.
New version in the works?
During VMware Explore 2026, Turner admitted that the company had focused too much attention on VCF in recent years. The company is now reportedly working on an update for VMware vSphere Standard, thereby refocusing on small organizations that need server virtualization without switching to the full VMware Cloud Foundation. The company released the last version of vSphere Standard about four years ago, after which things went quiet.
Broadcom will therefore maintain its focus on VCF and large enterprises, but seems to realize that this solution is too extensive for most companies that simply want to run and manage virtual machines. The company has not yet launched any specifications or pricing for the new product. Whether organizations are willing to return remains to be seen.