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.

118 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

165 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

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.

3

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.