When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school.
But the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today is different from the VMware before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders. This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.
Curriculum impacted by IT delays
Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware’s vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.
However, like many of VMware customers, the Indiana school district was priced out of VMware after Broadcom’s acquisition of the company. The IT director said the district received a quote that was “three to six” times higher than expected. This came as the school district is looking to manage changes in education-related taxes and funding over the next few years. As a result, the district’s migration from VMware is taking IT resources from other projects, including ones aimed at improving curriculum.
For instance, the Indiana district has been trying to bolster its technology curriculum, the IT director said. One way is through a summer employment program for upperclassmen that teaches how to use real-world IT products, like VMware and Cisco Meraki technologies. The district previously relied on VMware-based virtual machines (VMs )for creating “very easily and accessible” test environments for these students. But the school is no longer able to provide that opportunity, creating a learning "barrier," as the IT director put it.
The school district's IT department has also been seeking ways to teach the students, who use iPads in the classroom, touch typing.
“Kids aren’t typing anymore,” the IT head said.
This summer, the IT team planned to explore teaching options, including using software or developing their own app. They also wanted to test different keyboards to find one that had the layouts and durability that students need. However, the IT team couldn’t look for solutions as planned because the VMware migration took precedence. The IT director said:
There's only two people that really handle this type of stuff, so we couldn't focus on that. So [migration has] put us even farther behind in progress of some of the curriculum, as well as the sort of things that we want to explore as a technology team to help our students.
The IT worker noted that the IT team has about six employees total. For districts with less manpower or those that are less "technology-forward," dealing with a migration could be "catastrophic in that that’s too much work for one person,” the director said, adding:
It could be a chokehold, essentially, to where they're going to be basically forced into switching platforms—maybe before they were anticipating —or paying exorbitant prices that have skyrocketed for absolutely no reason. Nothing on the software side has changed. It's the same software. There's no features being added. Nobody's benefiting from the higher prices on the education side.
Mohammad Haque, co-founder and CTO at Propeller, which sells a fully managed virtual desktop infrastructure platform built on Amazon Web Services, told Ars Technica that he's seen schools be forced to redirect IT resources that would have been spent on other tasks, like upgrading cybersecurity and exploring trends such as artificial intelligence and blockchain, to migrating off of VMware.
"Projects are being re-prioritized and/or scrapped," Haque said via email. "Schools that had not yet adopted virtual desktop are either delaying these projects or dropping the plan/effort completely. Others that have already deployed virtual desktops are prioritizing migration projects to move away from VMware before their current contract/subscription ends."
Broadcom didn't respond to Ars Technica's request for comment for this article.
Compatibility problems
Migrating off of VMware hasn't only resulted in delayed projects for the Indiana school district; it has also brought complications for its HCI hardware. The district’s IT director told Ars that Dell won’t provide long-term support for the hardware if it's not running VMware. This is despite Dell reportedly touting a “10-year lifespan” on the devices when the district first bought in, in 2019, per the IT professional.
"They're basically holding our service contract hostage if we don't buy VMware," the IT director told Ars.
Put in a bind, the IT team is trying to repurpose the hardware without Dell support, noting that the district had already invested $250,000 into the system over six years.
"It's made us have to go back to the drawing board for the next three to four years, essentially," the IT leader said.
The Indiana IT director said Dell suggested that the district could buy an entirely new stack of server hardware with new support, but budget limits, especially over the coming years, make this unreasonable.
“New IT balloons very quickly, and [Dell workers] don't really seem to understand that I can't just spend that amount of money randomly,” the director said.
The Indiana district is now using the unsupported hardware, too.
"We are currently flying blind," the IT director said.
Ars reached out to Dell Technologies about the school district's situation and the impact that higher VMware prices have on organizations that have relied on Dell technology tied to VMware. A spokesperson shared the following statement:
Dell Technologies remains committed to supporting all VxRail customers with active support agreements. VxRail continues to deliver value for thousands of organizations globally, and we work closely with customers to ensure they can maximize their investment. Dell has a long history of offering choice through a broad portfolio of technology partners and solutions, helping organizations to select the path that best aligns to their strategy, infrastructure needs, and long-term IT goals.
Over in Idaho, VMware was part of Idaho Falls School District 91's IT setup since at least 2008. The school district operated about 80 VMs running on four ESXi hosts, all managed centrally through vCenter. The VMs hosted mission-critical systems, including the student information system, key databases, and other applications that directly support teaching and learning, Donovan Gregory, the district's IT SysNet administrator, told Ars.
But VMware became costly after Broadcom stopped selling perpetual licenses for VMware and bundled VMware products into a smaller number of SKUs. Notably, Broadcom got rid of VMware discounts for schools after buying the company. The Idaho district decided to migrate to Scale Computing, even though the platform "is noticeably more expensive than our pre-Broadcom VMware pricing," according to Gregory.
"Historically, VMware was very cost-effective for us, especially with education discounts," he said. "However, Broadcom’s initial renewal quote was nearly triple our previous cost and higher than Scale, Nutanix, or other alternatives we evaluated. That pricing shift was the main driver for our move."
After a two-month migration, Idaho Falls School District 91 hasn't used VMware since late August. One of the biggest migration challenges the district faced was finding new software providers to support its move to Scale Computing.
Gregory explained:
Three of our major software providers initially claimed their systems would not run in a non-VMware virtual environment. In two cases, we proved that incorrect. In the third, the vendor is still working toward compatibility, so we purchased a dedicated physical server from them rather than maintaining VMware just for one workload.
Gregory also noted that the district had "a few lingering Linux boxes that claimed they wouldn’t work on anything but VMware."
"We had two remaining ESXi hosts that last year VMware only charged us $5,000 for. So we weren’t in a hurry to move the remaining servers. However, two weeks before our renewal, they hit us with a renewal fee of $20,893 as the cheapest they could go. Obviously, we were not OK with that," he said.
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