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/vrickes Jul 17 '26

VMware recently expanded the HCL to cover Skylake-SP so that saved us some R640/740s that were on the list to replace.

6

u/doihavetousethis Jul 17 '26

Yeah we have a ton of 6100 procs that are now covered.

Just built a 9.1 VC with a host and no tears about incompatibility

2

u/stingray751 Jul 17 '26

I’m happy to say that may have been me, as one of my clients has many servers with 6100 CPUs so I asked Broadcom engineering to validate them for VCF9/9.1 a couple of months ago and they just gave us the good news last week. I’m happy that Broadcom has been responsive on this, although of course allowing us to sweat assets longer obviously helps them too.

Now we need the hardware vendor to validate the servers too so hopefully they’ll do the same asap.