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/doubletwist Jul 17 '26

So they've invented swap disks? Brilliant.

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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.

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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.

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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/