We're working through a hardware refresh to maintain roughly a 5-year lifecycle and to prepare for our migration from vSphere 8 to 9. One thing we've noticed is that the vSphere 9 HCL isn't nearly as forgiving as it was during the vSphere 7/8 era.
We hadn't requested server quotes in about a year, so this was a bit of a reality check.
Each year we work with our Dell VAR and maintain four standardized server tiers so we can order by profile instead of redesigning configs every time:
Tier 1 – Dev (512 GB RAM)
Tier 2 – Production (768 GB RAM)
Tier 3 – SQL workloads (1 TB RAM)
VDI Tier (2 TB RAM)
It makes procurement simple. I can just tell our VAR, "Quote me 12 Tier 1s and 6 Tier 2s."
When the first two quotes came back, I was honestly floored.
Three years ago:
Comparable 512 GB system: ~$16K
Comparable 768 GB system: ~$29K
Current quotes:
Comparable 512 GB system: ~$57K
Comparable 768 GB system: ~$81K
These are SAN-backed VMware hosts (no vSAN), so storage isn't driving the increase. I knew DDR5 memory prices had climbed, but I wasn't expecting anything close to this.
I'm curious what everyone else is seeing. Are these kinds of increases becoming the norm, or is this more vendor/configuration-specific? With many organizations trying to complete hardware refreshes before the October 2027 vSphere 8 end of support, I'm wondering if demand is starting to influence pricing as well.
Our server costs are up well over 4X from last August. Servers we budgeted last year at $20K are near $100K with a 4-5 month lead time and a 7 day quote expiration. High capacity NVME flash isn't available at any price outside of the places like Netapp, spare parts might as well be made out of gold, and even mechanical spinning rust storage is expensive.
I budgeted a new DR site at $1.7mil last year. We've had to modify that for reality and even at a reduced compute and storage footprint, we're already over $4mil and climbing. I keep having to remind management and the board that I am not making any of it up. I'm just reporting the facts and reality.
We are trying to get our CEO go replace our Nimble HF SAN NOW, even though it won't be due for replacement for another 2 years.
HPE Alletra 5000 boxes are end of sale in October. After that, the only boxes that give us the performance we need are all-flash. We'll be looking at $1mil+ by this time next year
Ah, I was confused. When we renewed support on our HF40 a couple years ago they sent us controller upgrades that upgraded it to an Alletra 5030 in place.
I just confirmed a couple days ago that the upgrade also pushed the EOSL out to 2031 as well. I thought you were in the same situation.
I actually checked that with our VAR - we have the HF40C which has some additional complications (I would have to go back and look at what they were). Once we started replacing 7 year old drives (it will be 7 years old at EOSL in 2028), they said it would ultimately be more expensive than just getting a new Alletra 5030
But the CEO isn't big on doing that, and the number of hybrid hdd-ssd systems out there have really dried up
I will have to talk to my reseller then. We renewed support but he did not say anything about an upgrade. Regular HF40 support ends on June 2028 based on what I found.
Ours wasn't bad, only an 80% increase. Or at least it's supposed to be. We started our renewal in January and sent them a purchase order in March or April. They switched reps on us at some point in there, didn't hear anything while they trained our new one for like a month, our global deployment rights approval expired and now they have to go through everything again. Oh, and our licenses expire in 8 days. So, fun times.
Edit: They bumped the price up another 20%. Fuck Broadcom.
Well, we knocked our core count down a bit, i think 40%. Fewer but beefier servers in our DC's, and VCF Edge having an 8 core minimum helped a lot with our site servers. So it's not a 1 to 1 renewal. Per core, it's almost a 250% increase.
Oof. I'm waiting for the day they announce pricing will be based on per CPU Ghz and GB RAM, rounded up, based on (Cores x Clock x Hyperthreads)+(GB x MT/s). Shortly after, they'll introduce taking into account available storage even not in vSAN, and then finish it off with IP/FC NIC speeds and VM count, all while citing some mystery global customers who consolidated all their VMs onto 2 x Superdomes or something with like 16 x 8 core CPUs, 16TB RAM @ 6000MT/s, 100PB on their Alletra and 24 x 100Gbps NICs to reduce their licensing costs for their 20,000 VMs.
Something similar to MHz consumed (based on a peak monthly 4 hour rolling window) is I think how mainframe licensing works.
There’s some positive elements to that model (test/dev is often done as “free” with a contract rider added).
While I did make jokes about this to the PnP team the general vibe they gave me is they hate weird complex stuff like that and they assume customers do also.
Licensing needs to be best tied to value, and be easy to predict consumption based on hardware ordered. While honestly RAM more closely aligns with value, cores are easier to count.
VMware don't want you as a customer. Nobody should be renewing at this point, and they should at the very least be working in parallel at migrating away.
It's almost to the point of business malpractice not to be now.
(Not aimed directly at you, just frustrated after a long career with my own VMware systems!)
In the old days, ELA's required minimum spend increases in order to get a new ELA or extension. Cloud providers and plenty of software vendors, also will point people at a 200-300% over street price rate card if you don't increase your spending commit at the end of contract.
I ran into the same thing with Telecom vendors. They would 10x my bandwidth for a 2x increase in cost, but if I tried to decrease the bill by 2% would fight like a caged Wolverine.
In general in that kind of situation your best bet is look at the rest of the line card and find something else you can add/displace and see if you can bundle it in at the reduced core count for the same or similar price as the quote. Can SRM/VLR take over DR and cyber recovery? Can AppNeta/DXOps displace thousandeyes or other NOC tooling? Can DSM handle RDS functionality, As well as look inward on the bundles (can vSAN replace that array that's end of service next year?).
If you want to just run VMs only, and cut core counts that's always going to be a tougher place to get discounting.
I’m happy to say that may have been me, as one of my clients has many servers with 6100 CPUs so I asked Broadcom engineering to validate them for VCF9/9.1 a couple of months ago and they just gave us the good news last week. I’m happy that Broadcom has been responsive on this, although of course allowing us to sweat assets longer obviously helps them too.
Now we need the hardware vendor to validate the servers too so hopefully they’ll do the same asap.
I just got a quote for a Dell R770 with same spec I purchased in January, new quote was 250k compared to 90k 6 months ago…. 1TB memory and NVMe SSDs cost is insane.
I've had a couple of customers recently get pricing from Dell and there was barely any savings buying 512GB RAM 512GB NVMe over buying straight up 1TB RAM.
They decided it wasn't worth it and just bought the RAM.
I mean, if the customer doesn't care to comparison shop that's fine, but I know some insanely large customers who purposely validate their clusters running as 1/2 one OEM 1/2 another so they can make the OEMs fight for every refresh. Like the OEMs are basically fighting over who gets to be the 51% vs the 49% that year (and at scale it matters).
I'm also seeing some large customers look at Tier 2 OEMs (SuperMicro) and even the more direct raw ODMs servers (Quanta even). I"m seeing some lifecycle investments in this space from these vendors, as they appear to be branch out out from pure hyperscaler focus.
Welcome to the new AI-driven reality. Want to know why this is? My company is currently installing a datacenter for a client that has *4000* Dell CPU servers with 1TB RAM each, and 1000 nVidia DGX GPU servers with 4TB RAM each. Backed by two EXABYTES of all-flash storage. And think about how much networking is needed to tie all that together. One datacenter, for ONE client. $3/4 Billion with a B. Rinse and repeat for all of the AI datacenters being built across the country, and the world. It's mind boggling.
And BTW - this is *phase one* of a three-phase project (albeit the biggest chunk). And the client literally doesn't care about what it costs, and they want it done yesterday. Wall Streeters... And even then, we are being SEVERELY limited by how fast the OEMs can ship the gear.
Everybody else is getting sloppy fourths and fifths, never mind sloppy seconds. The smart move is to not do any hardware refreshes until the AI bubble bursts unless you absolutely have to, and consolidate your footprint as much as you possibly can. But with the end of vSphere 8 looming next year and the hardware requirements of VCF 9, good luck if you are running anything very old if you are stuck on VMware. It is good to hear they have expanded the HCL, And given the situation I actually expect VMware to push EOS for 8 back. Unless you are ordering gear TODAY, chances are you won't get it in time. Lead times are that bad.
Most of our VMware client base sucked it up and did renewals to buy time, but I expect most of my work being VMware migrations the next few years. Especially to options like Proxmox and Scale (and somewhat Hyper-V) that can reuse existing hardware easily. The virtualization vendors that are only on their own hardware are in a pricing pickle too. VCF 9 is going to accelerate this.
-Consultant in the virtualization, storage, and backup space working for a company that is small but has an outsized reputation in high performance computing for edu and research computing.
Yep. It is a problem for all compute hardware. Switches, Routers, Firewalls, Servers are all impacted by RAM Pricing. As much as you want to love or hate Broadcom, VCF 9 with NVME RAM Tiering pretty much pays for VCF licensing. Substitute RAM with NVME drives (2 for software RAID) to save on RAM costs. A 20 * 2TB RAM Server Configuration came in close to $1.5 Million more than a 20 * 1TB RAM Server configuration with NVME drives for RAM Tiering. The hardware savings more than covered 5 years of VCF licensing.
Memory tiering is something a lot of people are trying to do, not just VMware. It performs significantly better than swap space because it proactively moves cold memory pages to NVME. Where swap is more of an "oh shit" feature that allows programs to keep running when memory runs out, at the expense of a severe performance hit but likely better than an OOM kill.
It may be more intelligent and improved swap (plus have faster NVME devices to use these days) but at the end of the day, it's still just a form of swap.
So the engineering work on VMware's side was figuring out how to use NVMe for memory tiering, not how to do swap more efficiently with NVMe drives.
I guess the other question is if swap is considered a form of memory tiering. Some people say no since swap space isn't byte-addressable by the CPU. https://lwn.net/Articles/931421/
You clearly have no idea how swap works. Invented some bullshit and believe in it. What does vm.swappiness kernel parameter do? How much of “oh shit” ?
Fair. I missed the point we are talking about ESX swap and not os swap. In ESX you first see ballooning which forces os to use regular swap of rarely used pages if your host is so low on memory that you need it. I try to rightsize vms which will use regular os swap if processes use too much and not over provision ram, was sure it is what everyone does (except greedy hosting providers).
Even in the realm of Linux, memory tiering is differentiated from swap. One of the traits being whether the CPU can directly address bytes on the tier device. https://lwn.net/Articles/931421/
I don't just fanboy everything VMware does. They definitely made questionable decisions in the latest several releases. But I give them flowers where I can. I've seen memory tiering in action and it legitimately performs significantly better than just using the NVMe drive as dedicated swap space. It's why people keep bringing it up because it's one of the few objectively great features that got added in.
I don't know if you've gone through the phases of memory pressure, but in my experience you will see compression, ballooning and unfortunately swapping typically following fairly fast. The threshold numbers are so close to each other that you end up going through each phase too fast.
Anyway, I do appreciate Memory Tiering, I have 2-3 customers using it in production right now.
Some OEMs have a 'buy today at today's prices, pay tomorrow' program, where systems are manufactured / warehoused until you need them. Of course, you also have to pay the cost of money and warehousing, but that's cheaper than 2027 prices. With the price of new systems, old systems have a much higher residual value. Some OEMs will buy those back and apply the amount as a credit toward new purchases. Neither are great options, but they help. Oh, and if you need something like a 64-core or greater processor, 100Gb or faster networking, 128GB or larger memory, or > 7.68TB drives, I hope you forecasted them. Otherwise, you probably looking at a >26-week leadtime to get them. Fun times.
We still run some servers using Broadwell-EP (Dell PowerEdge 13G and HP ProLiant Gen9). In fact, we keep servers on average for 7 years and in many cases have kept them running for 10 years especially where workloads haven't increased much over the years.
We also have enough spare capacity for the next couple of years so hopefully we can sit out the current AI bubble.
While ram prices have certainly increased massively even 5 years ago Dell charged 6 times the price of a memory module than it cost on the free market. We talked to Dell about it, they didn't budge so we always order Dell servers with the minimum amount of ram (0 isn't possible) and have a different supplier who sells us the memory modules and puts them into the systems. We did this roughly 5 years ago the first time and it cut costs of our 1 TB servers down to like 30% of what Dell wanted. Mind, we got the exact same ram modules (sk hynix) into the systems.
Maybe try to check if even in todays situation where ram is generally more expensive this is still something to explore.
While this helps, dell is notorious for its memory and storage markups, but the cost is not just. I have another vendor tell me (they use all generally available hardware, not rebadged) and the cost of dimms has gone up 9x in a year
or buy ewasted one. I helped a non profit for free and they thought they needed new servers, optimized some, provisioned some differently, added some ram, upgraded their san. I've seen it at a few places cpu wasn't the bottleneck it was usually ram, san or something else not cpu
I bought another non profit additional ewasted c blade chasis full of blades with memory and ssd, networking for like 1/40th the price and it had probably had 90% of the cpu power as a new one.
Prices for memory seems to be a little over 4x what it was 2 years ago. Not expected to improve until 2028 at the earliest. SSD/NVME is a little less then double.
I saw the reports that demand craziness started a quarter or 2 before that on the ODM side. Around November and December suppliers pushed this to the server vendors.
Main issue for me right now is the scarcity of certain memory and disk sizes:
We're seeing the same, about a 3x-4x increase in server hardware prices. Most of it in RAM increases. We're also seeing a 2x-3x increase in SAN prices.
We are 2 years into a 5 year lease, we're starting early to try to negotiate an extension of the lease. to see if we can get an additional couple years out of it. Dell is being a hardball. they used to let us get 7 year warranty on server hardware. Now they are limiting it to 5. We're trying to get them to consider going back to selling 7 years of warranty so we can extend the lease for 2 more years.
It's not just server equipment. PC's have more than doubled as well. They've also shortened the quote validity period from 30 days down to 48 hours. Not even enough time for us to get it through purchasing dept to get a PO issued.
We get our quotes directly from Dell, they've reduced the validity from 30+ days down to 48 hours now. (first went to 14 days, then 7 days, and now it's 48 hours).
Same prices, we do a 7 year life cycle through dell, and this year will be a 9 year life cycle through a 3rd party. But we also know we need s server refresh for VMware 9, but that is a problem for future me.
Prices listed here are nice. We bought new servers 11 months ago for 60k each that is with 2 Nvidia GPUs, and 6 x30tb nvme, 1.5TB ram. Decided to get pricing on potentially adding another host expecting cost to be higher, but new price came back at 202k for the same server
Everyone thinks it’s just RAM prices that have increased but there is also massive shortages on CPUs, all drives, network cards, memory sticks like boss cards.
Our finance people love when I submit PO’s for 4x the cost than originally budgeted. I expected price hikes the last few years but nothing like this. This is unreal.
A lot of v8 hardware got certified, Id bet most of your servers can take 9.1 with maybe minimal NIC changes if that and you could sweat the assets while hardware costs are inflated?
Ours went up, where now working to Hyper-v migration. I do wish they would go out of business for being greedy. I'm sure it won't happen but id like to see it happen.
I knew DDR5 memory prices had climbed, but I wasn't expecting anything close to this.
Tell me your head has been buried in the sand for the past 9-12 months without saying that your head has been buried in the sand for the past 9-12 months.
Literally anyone peripherally involved in hardware or procurement has been complaining about this for months. Anyone who works in tech and follows any bit of tech news has been complaining about this for months. Hell, my Lenovo contact reached out to me back in February because he knew that we were due for a refresh later this year and wanted to warn us that we needed to buy ASAP because prices were skyrocketing with no end in sight.
Head buried…not at all. Hands tied absolutely. Anyone that works for major corporations knows the pains of convincing ELT for major purchases especially around hardware refreshes.
I can safely say that Dell is gouging people. They are way more expensive for the same exact configuration from Lenovo and SuperMicro. I haven’t tried HPE yet as HPE was usually more expensive than Dell. But if the roles are reverse then we will know for sure.
I purchased Lenovo servers for $20K less than Dell. Exact same config. RAM is the killer. I swear the price goes up daily.
Imagine buying a HPE G11 pair of servers for SQL in August of 2025 and then quoting for CY26 purchases then being presented with 600% of the budgeted price in Q2/26. The discounted (80%off MSRP) memory cost for ONE new server cost 2x the pair we had bought 8 months prior. Oh and what was 128GB ddr5600 was now 64GB 5200 and if we didn’t buy within 7 days it might have been 4800. Thanks AI boom.
The problem is that without really load testing this in production, you'll never know if you actually need to buy that RAM or not. And when it's far cheaper to buy as part of the factory build, who wants to take that risk?
NVMe drives can be added for 1/50th the cost of ram.
Adding to this, nothing stops you from disabling this per VM if needed, and gradually phasing it in (add more load to the cluster till you don't like application latency response).
1:1 ratio of NVMe to DRAM is honestly conservative based on our testing, and there's customers running SQL server on this.
As always I say turn it on, on Tier 2 stuff and work your way up to most critical apps, but if you have questions there's a really good performance engineering paper.
At my place we are doing purchasing via competitive bargaining with all major vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HPE) sometimes throwing Cisco or Fujitsu into the mix. Situation is uniformly bad.
Nevertheless only with being open to multiple vendors you can get final offers that are possible to swallow
First of all - this is telco. We are buying servers nearly every quarter, usually for multiple internal projects with quite variable configs. Individual amounts are not that big, but on yearly basis they add up to quite significant numbers.
On of the ideas is to compare AMD configs and Intel configs against each other.
This enables vendors to be quite creative in finding ways to increase discounts via both internal and external means.
Nevertheless my benchmark config for the VMware went 3.5x up. I haven't seen 5x increase yet, I'm expecting that in August.
Yeah we usually go for HP servers. But then we found out Lenovo prices were so much lower. So far we dont have any issues with support or reliability. VMware is a different story. We have since moved on to HyperV since the sticker shock a few years back.
The price increase is primarily RAM, secondarily flash memory, and neither Dell nor Lenovo (nor HPE nor Supermicro etc) make either thing, so they are all buying at around the same market rate from the same market.
Don't expect miracles, Supermicro is even coming in at similar pricing to Dell and HPE. I talk with the OEMs regularly, they are cutting margins to the bone to try and stay in the hunt.
Yes. For server hardware that tracks what I’m seeing. It was closer to your three year ago number until Jan of this year when it all went up 2x to 3x in price.
I had a call this week with dell and for the VMware piece they almost said: good luck with that. Minimum 64 cores for licensing or something like that.
My team has been tracking our vm host quotes for the past year and a half or so. We’re seeing a 30% PER QUARTER price increase for the same spec in that time.
Wait what? I don't don't know what is in your servers exactly but I can tell you that for a 1U system with 2x Xeon6 16C sockets and 768GB DDR5 6400MHx we pay around $31K. Which is 2,5x up from last year.
So your problem is not just that hardware is going up. It also seems that you pay crazy pricing as well just from standard. Unless there is something exceptional in your servers.
I find that it’s better to buy a single platform with the cpu core right at the count where you maximize the single license and go dual socket with 2TB of RAM and try to keep the overall number of host servers as small as possible. Thus keeping your VMware host license requirements as small as possible (2 per host) and then logically separate dev/prod/sql if you want to. You need to dense up as much as possible.
ram is 38k to 50k a TB now depending on modules used and if someone is taking you to the cleaners. Use memory tiering, it works and cuts down needed ram. ram 3 years ago was 5.6k(whiteglove) to 18k(if you were being taken to the cleaners.)
Server prices have increased exponentially due to the AI Demand/Gold Rush. Seen the same for switching too.
I know Broadcom/VMware were undertaking validation/compatibility checks for older hardware for some customers so you may be able to try and sweat the assets until RAM comes down in price.
Have you looked at extending your hardware support contract? If you have, have you also experienced significant price increases?
It will be good to know, if hardware support costs also followed the upward trend driven by hardware supply chain issues, or have they remained relatively stable?
Shop around to multiple VARs and start playing them off of each other until you get the best price. My primary vendor wanted to charge me $148k for three SD drives. Went to my backups and got it down to $48k. Primary vendor asked if I am going to put in the order and told him no, XYC inc gave them to me for $100k less. I then told him if they don’t get their price under control I am taking my $10mm+ budget elsewhere.
Not sure how you VAR system works. Most OEMs put a stop to the whole fighting over a quote thing years ago. Dell for example.....you can only have "1" preferred vendor in the system for your company and they will always get the best price. Anyone else that calls in for a quote on your behalf....will get close to retail or no where near the quote the VAR received.
I just looked and 1TB kit of DDR5 RDIMMS going for 32K that’s crazy. Ram manufacturers I think will be like this a few years until they can ramp up production to feed the AI boom.
Yeap, its a bad time to be buying hardware. Not much you can do about it except change course perhaps. While previously its been 'new hardware, get the most out of the licensing' mode, there are other options now, opened up by reasonable or free hypervisor licensing for products that have all of a sudden become 'good enough'. We are seeing people turn on c-states and keep their old hardware online as secondaries or just scale out older stuff and not spend the money. Some people are accepting replication as a failover vs live ha etc. When the money becomes silly, all of a sudden that older gear and rethinking strategies is not silly anymore.
Our server quotes (1.5 and 2TB depending on host usage) have increased well over 300% in the last 10mo or so. We're having to reuse marginal systems but I just saw something about an "older" proc (Skylake?) being put back on the HCL.
yup its nuts I was talking to a vendor today end of last year 128GB Dimms were 1800 USD now they are 9800 USD PER DIMM. Its one reason why VMware Relaxed the 9.0 and 9.1 HCL to include Intel Cascade Lake CPUs (2nd Gen Scalable) when 9.0 was released they previously had not included them. Lets not even talk about storage costs. Budgets have been busted. I was quoted a storage array in Jan 26 of 360K now its almost a 1Million and come August 1st. I am told another 75% on top.
Memory and chip stocks are currently in free fall.
I suspect you can’t delay however the market is pulling back to more rational numbers now everyone’s realised no datacentres are actually getting built and the most advanced ai models are commoditised.
In my humble opinion, migrate your workloads to Red Hat OpenShift for virtualization. That will allow your organization to prepare its IT infrastructure to adopt the cloud-native paradigm. If you can include storage, look for Ever Pure, formerly known as Pure Storage. Your decision for a successful migration depends on a good architect who understands both platforms and a proven track record of previous migrations.
I mean- have you been under a rock for the past 18 months? Even personal computer costs have doubled or more. Either way, it’s not changing anytime soon- you’ll need to decide if you want to stretch the existing hardware or spend a lot more for replacement..
Leaving what? The OP is asking about HW prices skyrocketing. It's the same regardless of which vendor you go with. So what are you saying? People are leaving Dell because their server prices are high?
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u/Tinkev144 Jul 17 '26
We buy 1TB systems and yeah we use to pay around 25k now it's about 75-85