---
# source: src/content/solutions/en/vmware/vsphere.md
# route:  /en/solutions/vmware/vsphere/
title: vSphere
tags: [virtualization]
vendors: [vmware]
summary: "The hypervisor under everything else: ESXi and vCenter. As vSphere Standard it is also sold on its own, without the larger bundles around it."
photoNeed: "A vSphere or VCF console on a real screen at soulTec: a cluster view, a running task, an inventory tree, so the reader should recognise the UI"
stub: false
draft: false
kind: product
addon: false
sourceNote: The Register, 2 September 2026 (Paul Turner, Ram Velaga); Broadcom on availability in EMEA, December 2025.
vendorName: VMware vSphere
status: current
statusNote: Broadcom announced a new version of vSphere Standard in September 2026. Its name, scope and price have not been published.
---

## What it is

vSphere is the foundation of virtualisation at VMware: the ESXi hypervisor on every server,
and vCenter, which joins the servers into clusters. When a host in a cluster fails, its
virtual machines restart on the others, in the same datacentre or across two sites. Servers,
desktops and containers run on it.

vSphere is part of both large Broadcom bundles,
[vSphere Foundation](/en/solutions/vmware/vsphere-foundation/) and
[VMware Cloud Foundation](/en/solutions/vmware/vmware-cloud-foundation/). On its own it is
called vSphere Standard: the hypervisor with one vCenter instance.

## Where vSphere Standard stands

The last major version of vSphere Standard is 8, from 2022. vSphere 9 shipped in 2025 with
VCF 9; there was no version 9 of vSphere Standard.

In September 2026 Broadcom announced a new version of vSphere Standard, meant for
environments of around 128 cores. Its name, scope and price have not been published;
Broadcom has said details are likely at VMware Explore in Europe in mid-October.

Which bundle can be bought in which country is set by Broadcom per region. At the end of 2025
Broadcom withdrew vSphere Foundation from parts of EMEA and explicitly kept vSphere Standard
there. Broadcom has not published which countries are affected and refers customers to its
partners for availability.

## Architectures

Which architecture fits depends on what the business needs. Each has advantages and
drawbacks, and our engineers work out the right one with you.

- **Single site.** All ESXi servers in the same datacentre. The classic variant, with the
  fewest prerequisites; disaster recovery needs additional solutions.
- **Stretched cluster.** The ESXi servers stand at two sites and belong to the same cluster.
  More prerequisites, in return for advantages in high availability.
- **Remote office.** Branches with their own hardware on site, vCenter run centrally. It
  combines with either of the other two.

## How we build it

We do not install ESXi by hand. Our own installation automation, the ESXi Deployment
Appliance (EDA), installs one, ten or hundreds of ESXi servers without errors, and we have
maintained it for years. It comes with every project that includes vSphere, upgrades too, so
nothing old is carried over. How it came about is in
[Rapid ESXi Deployment Appliance](/en/insights/alternative-to-vmware-autodeploy-rapid-esxi-deployment-appliance/).

What vCenter offers through its interfaces is usable from PowerShell with PowerCLI. Our
engineers have automated countless tasks with it in large environments. Some scripts
delivered a function that later arrived natively in the product, such as the correct
[conversion of resource pool shares](https://github.com/virtualFrog/PowerCLI-Scripts/blob/master/Set-ResourcePoolGranular.ps1);
others customers have used for years, especially in stretched clusters.

## Protecting the platform

A stretched cluster absorbs many failures, but not every one, and no attack. For disaster
recovery we use [Zerto](/en/solutions/hpe/hpe-zerto/) and Veeam, and our engineers
recertify on both with every new version.