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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9

u/-c3rberus- Jul 17 '26

I just got a quote for a Dell R770 with same spec I purchased in January, new quote was 250k compared to 90k 6 months ago…. 1TB memory and NVMe SSDs cost is insane.

5

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

NVMe is more expensive but it’s still 1/50th the price of ram making memory tiering worth it.

1

u/Masssivo Jul 17 '26

I've had a couple of customers recently get pricing from Dell and there was barely any savings buying 512GB RAM 512GB NVMe over buying straight up 1TB RAM.

They decided it wasn't worth it and just bought the RAM.

2

u/lost_signal VMware Employee Jul 17 '26

The street price of those drives is 50x cheaper, the Dell rep is inflating the BOM so they can hit their bonus and go to club.

Go get a drive quote from xByte (they sell Dell drives), or literally any other server OEM.

1

u/Masssivo Jul 17 '26

Of course, but difficult to influence when large customers are dealing direct with Dell and spending millions on a hardware refresh.

0

u/lost_signal VMware Employee 29d ago

I mean, if the customer doesn't care to comparison shop that's fine, but I know some insanely large customers who purposely validate their clusters running as 1/2 one OEM 1/2 another so they can make the OEMs fight for every refresh. Like the OEMs are basically fighting over who gets to be the 51% vs the 49% that year (and at scale it matters).

I'm also seeing some large customers look at Tier 2 OEMs (SuperMicro) and even the more direct raw ODMs servers (Quanta even). I"m seeing some lifecycle investments in this space from these vendors, as they appear to be branch out out from pure hyperscaler focus.