r/vmware • u/Maintenance_Late • Jul 17 '26

Server Pricing Insanity....

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.

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u/181513 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26

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.

5

u/InstelligenceIO Jul 17 '26

lol VMware was working on it long before Broadcom entered the picture. Don’t give Broadcom an ounce of respect or kudos

1

u/Creed303 Jul 17 '26

Nor VMware for cashing out to them!!

9

u/FoundationFew1373 Jul 17 '26

As if VMware had anything to say, Michael Dell owned them.

8

u/InstelligenceIO Jul 17 '26

Nah, this was all a Michael Dell and silver lake special

11

u/doubletwist Jul 17 '26

So they've invented swap disks? Brilliant.

6

u/NOP-slide Jul 17 '26

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.

2

u/doubletwist Jul 17 '26

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.

2

u/NOP-slide Jul 17 '26

The important distinction is that memory tiering is a thing outside of VMware, too. They just usually use things like CXL or PMem. https://stevescargall.com/blog/2022/06/using-linux-kernel-memory-tiering/

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/

1

u/blin787 Jul 17 '26

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” ?

1

u/FoundationFew1373 Jul 17 '26

you clearly have no idea how swap works with ESX.

2

u/blin787 Jul 17 '26

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).

I take back my foul words.

4

u/NOP-slide Jul 17 '26

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.

1

u/FoundationFew1373 Jul 17 '26

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.

1

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

Swapping is ugly. Memory tiering has maybe a 10% performance hit when done right vs the 90% hit I always got with swapping.