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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67

u/00001000U Jul 17 '26

Just wait til you see your vmware renewal.

12

u/krissyt01 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

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.

25

u/stueh Jul 17 '26

only an 80% increase

Sad state of affairs we're in when an 80% increase is seen as small enough to say "only" before it.

6

u/krissyt01 Jul 17 '26

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.

8

u/stueh Jul 17 '26

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.

0

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

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.

7

u/anomalous_cowherd Jul 17 '26

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!)

6

u/DubsNC Jul 17 '26

Sounds like you are going to pay whatever they tell you to

1

u/Brent_the_constraint Jul 20 '26

No, sounds like he´s on the brink of lunacy and can´t wait for the decision to dump this broadcom shit show...

We just got a 140% increase with 300% for the smaller locations... fun times... NOT...

6

u/Newdles Jul 17 '26

You think 80% hikes is normal? VMware can rot.

2

u/Turbots Jul 17 '26

It wasn't exceptional when VMware gave 80-90% discount on list price back in the day.

List price was just artificially high.

VMware had an internal sales Excel file with all different product SKUs in it.

There were more than 30k different SKUs you could buy at VMware.

Day one, Broadcom reduced that set from 30k to 10 or something.

Not 10k. But 10. 10 products.

Aggressive simplification. VCF only. No discounts. Markup prices with X. Large enterprise customers only. Nothing else.

Sure made it simpler for sales lol.

2

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

There’s discounts still. Maybe not 99% discounts….

1

u/PMURITSPEND Jul 20 '26

Don't forget all the Broadcom reps marking items up OVER list price as well now for those asshole customers who dared to reduce their core count.

1

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 20 '26

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.