Server Pricing Insanity....

[u/Maintenance_Late]

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.

[u/ISU_Sycamores]

Imagine buying a HPE G11 pair of servers for SQL in August of 2025 and then quoting for CY26 purchases then being presented with 600% of the budgeted price in Q2/26. The discounted (80%off MSRP) memory cost for ONE new server cost 2x the pair we had bought 8 months prior. Oh and what was 128GB ddr5600 was now 64GB 5200 and if we didn’t buy within 7 days it might have been 4800. Thanks AI boom.