VMware Backup Pricing for UK MSPs: Per-VM vs Per-Socket, and What It Actually Costs
Quick answer. BOBcloud backs up VMware at £3.00 per virtual machine per month, plus a base server licence for each protected host.* There is no per-socket or per-CPU charge, so the price follows how many machines you are actually protecting rather than how much hardware they happen to run on. Storage is billed separately on usage, in the UK on Wasabi London at £20/TB.
Disclosure. BOBcloud publishes this article and sells a white-label backup platform to MSPs with VMware protection included. Our rates are below in full. We have not quoted competitor prices — most do not publish them, and inventing figures would not help you compare.
VMware backup is one of the few areas where the licensing model matters more than the headline rate. Two vendors can quote numbers that look similar and produce bills that differ by a factor of three, depending entirely on how densely your customers pack their hosts.
This is a practical guide to the models, what each does to an MSP's margin, and what ours costs.
Per-socket, per-CPU, per-VM: why the unit decides the price
Three models dominate VMware backup licensing.
Per-socket. You pay for each physical CPU socket in the host, regardless of how many VMs run on it. This was the industry standard for years and suits densely consolidated estates — a two-socket host running 40 VMs costs the same as one running four.
Per-CPU or per-core. A variation that has become more common as core counts have risen. It tracks hardware capacity rather than workload count, and it has been moving upward as CPUs get bigger.
Per-VM. You pay for each virtual machine you protect. The price follows the workload, not the tin.
Neither approach is inherently better. They favour different estates:
| Estate shape | Cheaper model |
|---|---|
| Few hosts, many VMs each | Per-socket |
| Many hosts, few VMs each | Per-VM |
| Older hardware, low consolidation | Per-VM |
| Newer high-core hosts, dense | Per-socket |
| Estate size varies month to month | Per-VM |
Most MSP customer estates fall into the second and third rows. A small business with two or three hosts running eight to fifteen VMs each is the common shape, and per-socket pricing on that profile means paying for capacity nobody is using.
What it costs
Our VMware backup is £3.00 per VM per month, wholesale, plus a base server licence for each host you protect.*
| Item | Price / month |
|---|---|
| Base server licence, per protected host * | see calculator |
| Each virtual machine | £3.00 |
| Storage — Wasabi London (UK) | £0.02/GB (£20 per TB) |
| Storage — Azure UK South | £0.06/GB (£60 per TB) |
| Storage — your own destination | no charge |
No minimum VM count, no minimum term, and restores are not metered.
Worked examples
One host, 10 VMs, 1 TB of backup data
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| 1 base server licence | see calculator |
| 10 VMs × £3.00 | £30.00 |
| 1 TB on Wasabi London | £20.00 |
| VM and storage subtotal | £50.00 / month |
Three hosts, 45 VMs, 4 TB
| Line | Cost |
|---|---|
| 3 base server licences | see calculator |
| 45 VMs × £3.00 | £135.00 |
| 4 TB on Wasabi London | £80.00 |
| VM and storage subtotal | £215.00 / month |
Add the base server licence for each host to get the full figure. Both examples are wholesale — what you charge your customers is your decision.
Model your own estate on the cost calculator, or see every rate on the pricing page.
Where per-VM pricing is the wrong answer
Worth being straight about this, because it is the case where we cost more.
Dense consolidation. A two-socket host running 40 VMs is £120 a month in VM licences with us, plus the base server licence and storage. On a per-socket licence that same host is two licences, whatever the vendor charges for them. If your customers run high VM density on modern hardware, per-socket will usually win and you should price accordingly.
Large VMs you do not need individually. If a customer has twelve VMs but only three matter, per-VM lets you protect only those three. If all twelve matter and they sit on one host, per-socket is the cheaper shape.
The break-even depends on the competitor's socket price, which we cannot tell you because they do not publish it. What we can tell you is the shape to work it out with: a base server licence per host, plus £3.00 per VM. Put that next to whatever you have been quoted, using your actual customer estates rather than a hypothetical one.
Why this is coming up now
Broadcom's changes to VMware licensing since the acquisition have pushed a lot of MSPs to re-examine their virtualisation estates — some consolidating, some moving workloads to Hyper-V or Proxmox, some staying and absorbing the cost.
Whichever way that lands, it changes the arithmetic on backup. An estate that consolidates onto fewer, denser hosts shifts the advantage toward per-socket. An estate that fragments or moves partly to another hypervisor shifts it toward per-VM. If you have not re-run the comparison since the licensing changes, the answer you reached two years ago may no longer be the right one.
Worth noting we also back up Hyper-V at the same £3.00 per VM, and Proxmox VE is covered under the standard server licence — so a mixed or migrating estate does not mean a second backup vendor.
What the VMware module covers
Backup runs at the virtual machine level rather than requiring an agent inside every guest, which matters for deployment effort across a large estate. Snapshots, incremental backups after the first full, and restore of an individual VM or the whole host.
Three things worth checking with any VMware backup vendor, ours included:
- Can you restore a single file from inside a VM, or only the whole machine?
- What happens to the backup when a VM is migrated between hosts?
- Is there a charge for the restore itself, or for data leaving the platform?
Where we're not the right answer
You need instant VM recovery on-site. If a customer's tolerance is measured in minutes and they need a failed VM running again immediately, an on-premise appliance with instant virtualisation does that better than any cloud-only platform, ours included. The physics of pulling a VM image over a business broadband connection do not care about your RTO document.
You want backup inside a single-vendor stack. If backup arriving on the same invoice as your RMM and PSA is worth more to you than pricing flexibility, a bundled platform suits you better.
Very dense hosts. As above. Run the numbers rather than assuming.
The question worth asking every vendor
Not "what does it cost per VM" — ask what happens to this bill when a customer consolidates four hosts into two, or adds fifteen VMs next year.
If the answer requires a call, the pricing model is doing work a price list should be doing.
* About the base server licence. Backing up a VMware host requires one base server licence for the host itself, in addition to £3.00 for each virtual machine on it. The base licence covers the host-level backup agent and the connection to the hypervisor; the per-VM charge covers each protected machine. So a host with 10 VMs is the base licence plus £30.00, not £30.00 on its own. The current base rate is on the cost calculator, which is public and needs no login. We have flagged it here rather than leaving it to appear on a quote, because the total is what matters when you are comparing platforms.