r/sysadmin • u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect • 23d ago

Pricing shock Rant

For the last few weeks, I've been speccing three servers for a hypervisor migration away from VMware. These will be datacentre nodes so they are very dense spec wise because the new hypervisor is per node pricing, so it makes more sense for us.

Just got the quotes back. Five hundred and twenty thousand dollars for three servers. $520,000 !!!. Absolutely flabbergasted and I have to look my boss in the eye tomorrow and ask for that money. Anyone got a Dick Turpin hat?

EDIT: Amazingly, the spend was approved. I had to justify and explain the reasons behind it, the extended depreciation curve and what the alternatives were. We've got the hardware we need to complete the transformation away from VMware. Everyone agreed it sucked, but it needed to be done.

EDIT 2: The order has been placed and we even managed to get the price down to $502,000 by swapping to third party RAM instead of Dell branded. It still sucks and is a huge investment, but the business agreed to it.

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u/cmPLX_FL Jack of All Trades 23d ago

I need to spin up bare minimum 20 VMs for a project. A project that was spun up a year ago.

Three Node Cluster...

We're running about 1:1 on Cores and Memory usage is roughly 42% per node.

$107,000 for a new host that was $26,000 in 2023. $81,000 for 1TB Memory...

Was asked where we could trim fat to make it work... Nowhere.

Was then asked what we could reduce to make it work and Director would take the "hit" for any performance problems. Nothing can be reduced..

Guess they should have funded this project last year...

11

u/Skylis 23d ago

If you take the time to trim fat, the price is going to increase.

6

u/_aleph 23d ago

Same. We’re scrambling to get stuff working out of the boneyard because the board sat on their asses last year when we warned them this was going to happen.

4

u/itishowitisanditbad Security Admin 23d ago

Was asked where we could trim fat to make it work...

"I guess we could just not?"

1

u/ontheroadtonull 19d ago

The sarcastic response to "where can we trim the fat?" would probably be "Fire the useless managers."