VCF9: What’s new in Licensing

Posted on June 18, 2025 Updated on June 19, 2025

VCF9 offers so many fantastic enhancements.  There were many stand out items which are getting a fair share publicity.  However, I wasn’t seeing many posts around the changes to licensing. There are several new and impactful requirements for licensing which deserve some attention.  This post is a culmination of data and documentation I found on the Broadcom website and is publicly available.  I just repurposed and organized it a bit.

Quick Summary –  

• You now manage your licenses through VCF Operations across your entire fleet and can manage licenses for multiple VCF Operations instances from the VCF Business Services console (vcf.broadcom.com), a part of the Broadcom Support Portal.
• To license a VCF9 deployment customers must deploy VCF Operations and a vCenter server.  Then in the VCF Business Services console attach their license key to their site ID and register the VCF Operation instance.  Next, deploy a secure license file to VCF Operations.  Lastly, VCF Operations deploys keys to the vCenter server to be attached to hosts.

Quick Walk Through:

• Your VCF9 Subscription is tied to your site ID.
• In this example we have 300 Cores of VCF.
• Your VCF Operations is registered in the VCF Business Services console and tied to this site ID.
• In the VCF Business Services console, you allocate cores and create a Secure license file.
• This Secure License file is deployed to VCF Operations.
• In this example 256 cores were allocated to a Secure license file.
• Via VCF Operation, the Secure License file is attached to a vCenter Sever Instance
• vCenter Server allocates cores to hosts
• In this example, you can see where Host 1& 2 received 128 cores each, but there were not enough cores for the 3rd cluster.
• 180 Days (6 Months) later VCF Operations automatically reaches out to VCF Business Services console and reports in.

What is the VCF Business Services console?

• VCF Business Services console provides the ability to manage licenses, VMware Cloud Foundation Usage Meter appliances, user roles, and resource access.
• More information here

Licensing Types:

• There are two types of licenses
  • Primary licenses, such as VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation licenses.
  • Add-on licenses, such as vSAN add-on capacity or VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA licenses. 
  • NOTE: You no longer license individual components such as NSX, HCX, VCF Automation, and so on. Instead, for VCF and vSphere Foundation, you have a single license capacity provided for that product.

Licensing Modes:

• Connected Mode:
  • Most customers will have a “connected” or what some call a phone home mode.  
  • License usage reports are required at least once every 180 days to maintain your licenses and you must update your license to confirm that the license usage report was submitted.
  • This data is sent to the VCF Business Services console automatically, and licenses can be updated with a button click.
• Disconnected Mode:
  • If VCF Operations is registered in disconnected mode, to report license usage, you generate a usage file and upload it in the VCF Business Services console. For detailed instructions for both connected and disconnected registration modes, see Updating Licenses.
• Critical Infrastructure Mode:
  • This mode is reserved for critical infrastructure.  Think military or federal use.
  • This is a very uncommon mode and isn’t intended for customer consumption.

Other Notes:

1. Manage licenses and assign them to vCenter instances from VCF Operations. All hosts and components connected to a vCenter instance with an assigned license are automatically licensed from vCenter assignments.
2. VCF Operations can be connected to the VCF Business Services console for faster licensing, updates, and automated reporting. VCF Operations can also operate in disconnected mode.
3. Fewer licenses to manage.
   1. Now, instead of 11 license keys, there are only two licenses for VCF – “VMware Cloud Foundation (cores)” and “VMware vSAN (TiBs)”. vSphere Foundation follows this same pattern.
   2. Multiple subscriptions pool together into a single license that can optionally be split later.
   3. All licenses can be applied into your environment by importing a single license file. For connected VCF Operations instances, the first license file will download automatically after you complete the registration.
   4. License your vCenter, ESX hosts, NSX , VCF Operations HCX, VCF Automation, and other components by assigning the license to the vCenter instance.
4. License usage must be submitted from VCF Operations every 180 days, or hosts will disconnect from the vCenter instance and new workloads cannot be started (existing workloads will not be proactively stopped). If VCF Operations is in connected mode, license usage submission is automatic but still must be confirmed in VCF Operations by clicking Update Licenses. For VCF Operations in disconnected mode, follow the steps in the documentation to submit license usage.
5. Hosts are automatically reconnected to the respective vCenter instance with full capabilities when a valid license is applied and/or license usage is submitted and license refreshed.
6. Dynamic license quantity adjustment means that license changes made in the VCF Business Services console do not require reassignment.
7. Visualize a unified view of your usage over time for your fleet in VCF Operations and across multiple VCF Operations instances in the VCF Business Services console.
8. Evaluation Mode has been extended to 90 days.
9. The license usage file only records the following license usage data points: the usage generation timestamp, utilization details for both post-version 9 and pre-version 9 licenses, the unique VCF Operations instance ID, a unique identifier for the usage report, a list of post-version 9 licenses added to VCF Operations but currently unused, any detected usage anomalies, and the active status. Note that the license usage file exclusively gathers this specific information and, for clarity, does not collect personal data and customer data.

REF:

• Overview of the VMware Cloud Foundation Business Services Console
• VMware Cloud Foundation Business Services Console (PDF)
• VCF9 Licensing Overview
• VCF9 Updating Licenses