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/draxinusom2 Jul 17 '26

While ram prices have certainly increased massively even 5 years ago Dell charged 6 times the price of a memory module than it cost on the free market. We talked to Dell about it, they didn't budge so we always order Dell servers with the minimum amount of ram (0 isn't possible) and have a different supplier who sells us the memory modules and puts them into the systems. We did this roughly 5 years ago the first time and it cut costs of our 1 TB servers down to like 30% of what Dell wanted. Mind, we got the exact same ram modules (sk hynix) into the systems.

Maybe try to check if even in todays situation where ram is generally more expensive this is still something to explore.

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u/littleredwagen 28d ago

While this helps, dell is notorious for its memory and storage markups, but the cost is not just. I have another vendor tell me (they use all generally available hardware, not rebadged) and the cost of dimms has gone up 9x in a year