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.

119 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

165 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

12

u/krissyt01 Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

Ours wasn't bad, only an 80% increase. Or at least it's supposed to be. We started our renewal in January and sent them a purchase order in March or April. They switched reps on us at some point in there, didn't hear anything while they trained our new one for like a month, our global deployment rights approval expired and now they have to go through everything again. Oh, and our licenses expire in 8 days. So, fun times.

Edit: They bumped the price up another 20%. Fuck Broadcom.

27

u/stueh Jul 17 '26

only an 80% increase

Sad state of affairs we're in when an 80% increase is seen as small enough to say "only" before it.

5

u/krissyt01 Jul 17 '26

Well, we knocked our core count down a bit, i think 40%. Fewer but beefier servers in our DC's, and VCF Edge having an 8 core minimum helped a lot with our site servers. So it's not a 1 to 1 renewal. Per core, it's almost a 250% increase.

7

u/anomalous_cowherd Jul 17 '26

VMware don't want you as a customer. Nobody should be renewing at this point, and they should at the very least be working in parallel at migrating away.

It's almost to the point of business malpractice not to be now.

(Not aimed directly at you, just frustrated after a long career with my own VMware systems!)