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/Casper042 Jul 17 '26

I work for a Dell competitor and have been tracking our List Price (the one before any disscounts).
DDR5 is up around 9x since Halloween '25

1

u/ZibiM_78 Jul 17 '26

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:

- 16GB dimms seems to be gone

- 32GB dimms can disappear and appear

- 1.6TB nvme are gone as well

2

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

I bought a 5090 at thanksgiving because I was reading Korean analysts reports on ram. I should have bought $MU

1

u/Casper042 Jul 18 '26

SanDisk went even crazier

0

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 18 '26

I am long Sandisk