What your VMware renewal is actually buying.
Per-core licensing against a per-socket subscription, on the servers you already own. Every rate below is sourced and dated, and every step of the arithmetic is on the page where you can check it. The assumptions are printed in full further down. Your result gets its own address, so you can send it on or print it.
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Everything the arithmetic above depends on, with where it came from and when it was last checked. If one of these is wrong for you, so is the number. That’s why they’re here rather than in a footnote.
Your renewal is your number, not a list price
No VMware list price appears anywhere in this calculator. Published rates get discounted heavily in practice, so a headline built on one is a headline nobody’s invoice agrees with. The per-core figure here is derived instead: your renewal, divided by the cores you’re billed for. Check it against your own quote.
Every physical CPU licenses at 16 cores or more
It applies per processor, not to the total. That’s what makes it bite: two eight-core CPUs license as thirty-two cores, not sixteen. Source: Broadcom KB 313548, “Counting Cores for VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation”. Checked 9 September 2026.
The 72-core order minimum is off unless you turn it on
This is the rule everyone quotes, and it does not currently hold. Distributor Arrow told partners in March 2025 that the minimum would rise from 16 to 72 cores per order line from 10 April 2025 (The Register, 28 March 2025). Within about a fortnight distributors reported it withdrawn, and Broadcom said it had never announced a price change. Reporting since has been contradictory, so it sits here as a switch rather than as a fact. Tick it if your own quote applies one. Checked 9 September 2026.
Proxmox is priced per occupied CPU socket, per year
Basic €370, Standard €550, Premium €1,100 per socket per year, net of VAT, on a one-year term. Source: the Proxmox VE subscription pricing page, checked 9 September 2026. Its FAQ is explicit: “the number of CPU cores does not affect the price”. Every node in a cluster has to be on the same level. These are list prices in euro, and they move.
The Community tier is real and is not offered here
Proxmox sells a Community subscription at €120 per socket and files it under non-production use: “need support for production workloads? Choose Basic, Standard, or Premium.” Pricing a production estate on it would hand you a cheaper number than you can actually buy. Running with no subscription at all is possible too, on the no-subscription repository. It isn’t priced here for the same reason.
Proxmox support is Austrian business hours
Ticket support for the paid tiers runs Monday to Friday, 07:00–17:00 CET/CEST on Austrian business days. That’s overnight in Australia. It is a real difference from a local support arrangement, so it belongs in the comparison rather than in a footnote. Source: the same pricing page FAQ, checked 9 September 2026.
The exchange rate is an estimate you can overwrite
The default is 1.6113 Australian dollars per euro. That comes from the Reserve Bank’s published rate of 0.6206 euro per Australian dollar for 8 September 2026 (RBA exchange rates), inverted. It moves every day, which is why it’s an input rather than a constant. Put today’s rate in if the number matters to you.
Your renewal is assumed not to rise
The 3-year VMware figure is simply three times this year’s renewal. No uplift is applied, because we have no sourced figure for what yours will do. That’s the conservative assumption for the migration. If your renewal rises, the gap only widens.
The servers are reused, and no replacement cost is guessed at
Proxmox VE runs on the hardware you already own, so the biggest line in most vendor comparisons is missing from this one: a hardware refresh. What a refresh would have cost you is your figure, not ours. It shows as retained hardware at zero rather than as a saving we invented on your behalf.
GST is excluded on both sides
Enter your renewal excluding GST. The Proxmox figures are net of VAT, as their pricing page says, so both sides are compared on the same basis.
What this does not price
Your people’s time. Training. Tooling licensed per hypervisor, meaning backup software, monitoring agents and some security products, any of which may need replacing or re-licensing. Application vendor support statements, which sometimes name a hypervisor. On a small estate any one of these can be larger than the licensing difference, and none of them can be guessed at from four numbers. If you have a quote for them, put it in the migration cost field.
A number is not a migration plan.
What this can’t tell you is whether your workloads, your backup software and your application vendors will follow you across, and in what order. That’s a scoping conversation. It carries a fixed price and a written scope, like everything else here. If you’d rather read first, the writing covers how this gets done under real obligations.