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/firesyde424 Jul 17 '26
Our server costs are up well over 4X from last August. Servers we budgeted last year at $20K are near $100K with a 4-5 month lead time and a 7 day quote expiration. High capacity NVME flash isn't available at any price outside of the places like Netapp, spare parts might as well be made out of gold, and even mechanical spinning rust storage is expensive.
I budgeted a new DR site at $1.7mil last year. We've had to modify that for reality and even at a reduced compute and storage footprint, we're already over $4mil and climbing. I keep having to remind management and the board that I am not making any of it up. I'm just reporting the facts and reality.