Calculating Cores In VVF/VCF

Last updated on January 17th, 2026 at 17:59

Calculating exactly what you need for a new or existing VMware environment can be a little tricky, especially when vSAN is involved with the per TiB addon

Thankfully, Broadcom have a script to help with calculating the number of cores of VVF/VCF and any TiB addons for vSAN in this article here, download it

Important – By continuing you are agreeing to the disclaimer here

We will need PowerShell 7 for this, and its not included on Windows systems

Broadcom require PowerShell 7, which isnt the default on Server 2022/2025/W11

We can download this here

Scroll down to the assets of the current version and click the Win64.exe, you may need to click Show more as some of the downloads are hidden due to the number

Then double click the exe to install it
Accept the EULA and click install

And click close when its done

On Server 2025/W11 it will appear in the terminal drop down

On Server 2022 and older or W10 you can search for it and the app will now show

We can check our version with

$PSVersionTable

We will need PowerCLI installing with

Install-Module VMware.PowerCLI -Scope CurrentUser

You may get this prompt, enter Y and press Enter

And enter A and press Enter here

We can then check its installed with

Get-Module -Name VMware.PowerCLI -ListAvailable

It should look like this

Set the execution policy to be unrestricted with

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

And ignore SSL certificates that arent trusted

Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false

In Powershell 7 up and navigate to the directory where you downloaded it
The Windows default is C:\users\<username>\downloads, so you would run

cd C:\users\<username>\downloads

Mine is stored in D:\Downloads, so I ran

cd D:\Downloads

Then import the downloaded module with

Import-Module .\FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage.psm1

Then press R here and hit Enter

Now we need to connect to our vCenter server, to do this we can run

Connect-VIServer -Server <vCenter FQDN>

For for my vCenter, laniakea.istlab.co.uk I ran

Connect-VIServer -Server laniakea.istlab.co.uk

Enter the username for the [email protected] account then provide the password and hit Enter

It should show this, now PowerCLI is connected to the vCenter

If you are looking at a VVF subscription run

Get-FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage -DeploymentType VVF

It will take a little while to query the hosts, but when it is finished you will get an output like this

For a VCF environment run

Get-FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage -DeploymentType VCF

And when thats done you will see the same, but the vSAN license TiB count will be higher

Now, this has all clusters in, and you might only be renewing for a certain cluster so you dont want other clusters factoring into the vSAN licensing as your calculation will be incorrect
You can specify a specific cluster for VCF with

Get-FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage -ClusterName "Cluster_Name" –DeploymentType VCF

And for VVF with

Get-FoundationCoreAndTiBUsage -ClusterName "Cluster_Name" –DeploymentType VVF