New customers migrating off vSAN receive up to 1 PB of usable storage capacity at no charge in year one. 3-year term. $50k/yr minimum. Any hypervisor.
Why Now
Broadcom's per-core licensing model changed the economics of vSAN in ways that compound with every cluster expansion. Four structural problems are driving teams to evaluate alternatives before the next renewal cycle.
VMware Cloud Foundation is priced at approximately $350 per physical core per year. A 200-core cluster costs $70,000 per year in software licensing alone, before hardware, support, or add-ons. Every server refresh adds to that invoice.
vSAN couples compute and storage in the same hosts. You cannot add storage capacity without also adding compute capacity and paying per-core licensing on every new node. The reverse is equally true.
vSAN only runs on vSphere. Teams running Red Hat® OpenShift®, KubeVirt, or bare-metal Kubernetes alongside their VMware environment carry a hard storage dependency on vSphere that does not follow the workload.
vSAN management requires vCenter Server. Teams actively migrating workloads to Kubernetes must still keep vCenter running and licensed until the storage migration is complete, extending the cost tail of the VMware footprint.
Promotion Terms
The simplyblock vSAN migration promotion is for infrastructure teams evaluating a move off vSAN before their next renewal cycle locks in another multi-year per-core commitment.
Qualifying migrations receive up to 1 PB of usable storage capacity at no charge for the first year of the contract term. Applies to new simplyblock capacity provisioned as part of the migration, not to existing deployments.
The promotion applies to new customers signing a minimum three-year simplyblock subscription with a minimum annual contract value of $50,000. The free first-year storage is a one-time credit; years two and three are billed at standard capacity-based rates.
Contracts must be signed by 30 September 2026 to qualify. Teams whose vSAN renewals fall in Q3 or Q4 2026 have the strongest case for evaluating before the renewal resets another multi-year per-core term.
The promotion is available to new simplyblock customers currently running vSAN and migrating workloads to simplyblock disaggregated NVMe/TCP storage as part of a VMware migration program. A minimum annual contract value of $50,000 is required to qualify. Existing simplyblock customers and expansions of current deployments are not eligible for the first-year free storage credit. Contact us to confirm eligibility for your environment.
Usable storage is the capacity available to workloads after simplyblock's protection overhead (erasure coding or replication) is applied. A cluster running 2+1 erasure coding delivers roughly 67% of raw capacity as usable. The 1 PB ceiling applies to usable TB as reported by the simplyblock management plane, not to raw drive capacity.
Yes. The promotion covers new simplyblock capacity provisioned for either workload type, including Kubernetes persistent volumes, KubeVirt VM disks, and OpenShift storage, as long as the capacity is net new and part of the qualifying migration contract.
After year one, the previously free capacity rolls into standard simplyblock capacity-based billing at the contracted per-TB rate for years two and three. There is no cliff or re-provisioning event: workloads continue running on the same volumes and the storage begins appearing on the standard invoice.
Simplyblock is licensed per usable storage TB provisioned per year. There is no per-core, per-socket, or per-host component. The cost scales with how much data you store, not with how many servers are in the cluster. Talk to a storage architect for a model specific to your cluster size and workload mix.
Ask your AI of choice to compare vSAN per-core licensing with simplyblock's capacity-based model, or to explain what disaggregated NVMe/TCP storage means for VMware migration programs running OpenShift, KubeVirt, or bare-metal Kubernetes.
Broadcom’s per-core licensing model changed the renewal economics for vSAN customers in ways that compound over time. Every server added to the cluster, whether for compute or storage, adds to the annual software invoice. Teams whose clusters are growing are seeing that invoice increase in a way the previous per-socket model did not produce.
The goal of this promotion is to make the first year of the migration substantially easier to justify. Infrastructure teams running the cost comparison between continued vSAN renewal and a move to disaggregated NVMe storage can include up to 1 PB of free first-year storage in that model.
Most teams use a phased approach: simplyblock is introduced as a new storage tier alongside the existing vSAN deployment. New Kubernetes workloads, new VM disks, and new persistent volumes land on simplyblock from day one. Legacy VMs stay on vSAN and migrate progressively over six to eighteen months, aligned with the normal workload refresh cycle. No freeze or big-bang cutover required.
The detailed cost model for a 200-core vSAN cluster is in the vSAN exit cost economics post. For a broader comparison of vSAN alternatives including architecture, operational model, and Kubernetes fit, see best vSAN alternatives 2026.
Talk to a storage architect to get a model for your specific cluster size, workload mix, and timeline.
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