VMware vSphere is the enterprise-standard server virtualization suite, pairing the ESXi bare-metal hypervisor with vCenter management for clustering, vMotion live migration, DRS resource scheduling, and high availability. It has anchored corporate datacenters since the early 2000s and remains the platform much enterprise tooling assumes. Following Broadcom's 2023 acquisition of VMware, licensing moved to per-core subscription bundles (VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation) sold via quote, and the free ESXi edition was discontinued. It suits organizations that want the deepest ecosystem and certified integrations and accept commercial licensing costs.
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Overview
- Founded
- 1998
- Pricing tier
- High
- Startup-friendly
- No
- Enterprise-ready
- Yes
Private cloud / virtualization
- Open-source
- No
- Self-hostable
- Yes
- Hypervisor
- ESXi
- Hyperconverged
- Yes
- Management UI
- Yes
- Live migration
- Yes
- HA clustering
- Yes
- Free tier
- No