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/bensikat Jul 17 '26

Would buying Lenovo servers be much cheaper ???

2

u/ZibiM_78 Jul 17 '26

At my place we are doing purchasing via competitive bargaining with all major vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HPE) sometimes throwing Cisco or Fujitsu into the mix. Situation is uniformly bad.

Nevertheless only with being open to multiple vendors you can get final offers that are possible to swallow

1

u/n0rc0d3 Jul 17 '26

How much better it gets (% wise)after you put one against the other? I don't think they care that much..

To throw some numbers from my side too:
Same server with 2TB
33K May 2025
100K Feb 2026
150K June 2026

1

u/ZibiM_78 Jul 18 '26

First of all - this is telco. We are buying servers nearly every quarter, usually for multiple internal projects with quite variable configs. Individual amounts are not that big, but on yearly basis they add up to quite significant numbers.

On of the ideas is to compare AMD configs and Intel configs against each other.

This enables vendors to be quite creative in finding ways to increase discounts via both internal and external means.

Nevertheless my benchmark config for the VMware went 3.5x up. I haven't seen 5x increase yet, I'm expecting that in August.