Edition Fit Check
Which of vSphere Express, VMware vSphere Foundation or VMware Cloud Foundation your estate can actually use, by core count, sites and the capabilities you need. Entitlement and fit, no prices.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere.
Your estate
Physical cores across every host you intend to cover. Count every CPU at a minimum of sixteen cores.
Separate data centres or site IDs, not racks.
Where you are upgrading from.
Decides whether Express is even on your menu.
What you actually need
Next step. Once you know which edition fits, Estate Readiness Triage tells you which of your clusters can move as they are, and Upgrade Sequencer gives you the order to do it in.
What this is built on, and what it deliberately leaves out
- The 128-core cap is not a guideline. Broadcom's vSphere Express documentation states a maximum of 128 cores per customer, and that the VCF Business Services console prevents any allocation that exceeds 128 cores per customer or site ID.
- One licence, one site. The same page states you cannot split the default licence into smaller licences and cannot share it across sites. If you run three small offices, you cannot carve 128 cores between them.
- No add-ons exist for Express. Broadcom's words, not an inference. With Express you use VCF Operations only for licensing your environment, which is the licence server function rather than the operations product.
- Eligibility is not documented. The new-customer rule circulating comes from reseller briefings. Broadcom documents the technical cap and publishes no eligibility criteria, so this tool flags it rather than deciding it for you.
- There are no prices here, on purpose. Broadcom has published none for Express, and a figure from a distributor listing is not a price. The only number worth planning against is the one your partner puts in writing for your core count.
Checked 7 November 2026
Checked against Broadcom product documentation on 7 November 2026. Edition boundaries moved twice in 2026 already. Confirm against the current documentation, and note that this tool deliberately carries no pricing of any kind.
Where this comes from
- A new edition, a dead product line, the write-up behind these boundaries, with its own sources.
- Broadcom vSphere Express product documentation, for the core cap, the site limit and the version floor.
- Broadcom TechDocs, VCF Management Services models, for what the larger editions carry.
What this tool cannot know
- What you will actually be offered. Eligibility is a published position; what lands in a quote is a negotiation.
- Anything about cost. This tool does not hold prices and will not estimate one.
- Whether an add-on you need today will still be an add-on next quarter.
- Your existing entitlements, which frequently make the theoretically correct edition the wrong one to buy.
Part of the VCF planning toolkit
Next, work backwards from the support date and see whether there is time.