Scheppers Instituut Wetteren is switching to a managed cloud stack from whitesky.cloud as an alternative to its existing VMware environment. The school is keeping its existing infrastructure to offset the sharply increased licensing costs.
Scheppers Instituut Wetteren is making the switch from VMware to whitesky.cloud, the Lochristi-headquartered cloud company stated in a press release. The move came after the pricing and support context surrounding VMware changed, significantly impacting the budget—a situation that sounds familiar to many organizations following Broadcom’s major overhaul.
For a technical secondary school, the choice is also about accessibility. Students must be able to work with powerful software without families having to constantly invest in expensive laptops.
Expensive VMware licenses
Scheppers Instituut Wetteren says it faced sharply rising VMware licensing costs following the acquisition by Broadcom. For the school, this is no minor detail: education relies on a stable and high-performance VDI environment.
VMware also proved to be not very customer-friendly in other ways. The school states it was also faced with a license increase of up to four hundred percent. Additionally, the future of components such as Horizon View is becoming uncertain, which the institution believes poses a strategic risk.
Full reuse of existing infrastructure
A key element of the project is that the school does not need to purchase new hardware. Scheppers Instituut Wetteren is retaining its existing infrastructure as the foundation for the whitesky.cloud environment, ensuring the value of the investment is preserved. Whitesky.cloud is building a managed cloud stack on top of the school’s infrastructure. The environment has been tested and validated for reliability and for workloads centered around CAD.
The institution has the necessary capacity to keep virtual workspaces available for students and teachers. This approach avoids both additional investments and the costs and complexity associated with a full hardware replacement. As a result, the school can roll out the migration without having to rebuild its IT platform from scratch.