University of Canberra’s Auspicious Shift Away from VMware

January 23rd, 2025 | | 8:17
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In this Tech Barometer podcast segment, Justin Mason, associate director of vendor and operations at the University of Canberra, explains how moving to Nutanix software enabled their IT operations to run demanding AI and machine learning courses and keep students engaged in their online studies.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Transcript:

Justin Mason: We are all AHV now. We don’t have any VMware. We’ve been in that place now for a number of years, so we’ve been fortunate enough to miss this whole debacle around VMware and Broadcom at the moment. I know a lot of other organizations are kind of feeling that pressure now, so that’s one less thing we have to worry about.

[Related: Birth of a Hypervisor That Unleashed the Hybrid Multicloud Era]

Jason Lopez: Justin Mason is the associate director of vendor and operations at the University of Canberra in Australia’s Capital City. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. What we have here is a press conference from 2024, next held in Barcelona, Spain, as in our previous reporting. These press conferences are a bit different, favoring an informal face-to-face with tech journalists. So Mason started off with some background on how the University of Canberra’s IT organization adopted Nutanix. He oversees the IT strategy for the school, which numbers about 15,000 students and staff. About 10 years ago, they decided to move away from three tier architecture.

Justin Mason: We were early adopters in the sense of when we jumped on the Nutanix platform at the time, we started to look at, well, how can we do this better? How can we do things more cost effective? And that’s when we looked at Nutanix and hyperconverged. Back then, we were primarily a Hyper-V shop, so we started to run Hyper-V on Nutanix. That wasn’t as reliable as we’d hoped, but that was more on the Microsoft V clustering side of things. We then moved over to running VMware on Nutanix as our second POC or proof of concept. That went extremely well.

[Related: Wondering What Broadcom Will Do Switches to Mitigating VMware Risk]

Jason Lopez: Mason and his team decided to fully transition to hyperconverged in 2014,

Justin Mason: And that’s when we decided, okay, we want to go all in on this platform. It was doing what we needed to do as extremely reliable, and that’s when we started to look at it, move over all of our legacy architecture to Nutanix hyperconverged platform. A couple of years later, Nutanix came out with AHV because we were the kind of technology leads at the university. Were always encouraged to try new things, and at the time we were already paying additional licenses and VMware and could save some money in there. That area. It made sense. And fast forward today with Broadcom buying out VMware,

Jason Lopez: Mason explained how that early decision to move to Nutanix allowed the university’s IT efforts to be free of lock-in to a VMware license. Today, the university’s infrastructure hosts hundreds of VMs running on Nutanix clusters.

Justin Mason: We’ve probably about seven different clusters on Nutanix, 50 odd nodes, about 500 workloads, 500 odd VMs spread between the different cluster sets and some of our major corporate systems are running. So the way that things are panned out for the university, we have a cloud adoption framework that’s out of date.

[Related: Existing IT Hardware Gets New Path to Hybrid Multicloud]

Jason Lopez: But Mason says, as their workloads run either on a Nutanix private cloud or in SaaS services or even run a few things on public cloud, they’re revamping their cloud strategy.

Justin Mason: Getting onto public cloud is pretty easy. What we were finding is having skills to cover all the public cloud options. Like having an Azure expert, an AWS expert, a GCP expert wasn’t really financially viable to have that many different skilled resources across all those technology sets. But whereas Nutanix is kind of a single platform that we’ve had for a long time now. So our skill sets are pretty well developed across it. And obviously with a SaaS platform being that it’s a bit of a black box managed by other providers, that works well for us. So Nutanix is definitely going to play a large part in that cloud strategy moving forward.

Jason Lopez: The University of Canberra is a prime example of how antiquated the idea is that it runs anonymously in the background. Mason said the student experience plays a critical role in a university’s reputation, and that experience is significantly affected by the digital platform students use to sign up for classes, submit homework, send and receive messages with teachers and administrators, and to just stay connected to what’s going on on campus,

Justin Mason: Putting in systems now that can track the student experience and kind of flag when students might need additional help. They haven’t been to class in a long time. We have some systems around that like, well, hey, it looks like you haven’t put in your last assignment or something like that. Do you need additional help? So there’s definitely a lot of, and even more of it coming out the digital strategy and putting more importance on that to make sure that the students are at the front of that experience factor.

Jason Lopez: The university’s digital strategy launched earlier this year. It includes 30 initiatives aiming to enhance the student experience while ensuring staff and students develop the skills to use new digital tools effectively.

Justin Mason: It’s kind of one of those things where it’s a 10 year roadmap, years one to three is pretty much well bedded down and spelt out, but those other phases, while there’s a high overview of what they want to achieve, they’re really going to rely on what the outcomes of phase one is that’s going to feed into it. A lot of it is around the student experience, the student journey, and what we’re finding that comes into your question about the digital skills and training for users. I think that’s a really important aspect as well. Obviously, there’s a cloud strategy that’s coming out of the digital transformation. There’s a big piece around integration, especially universities, probably similar for other organizations, so many separate systems and getting them to talk to each other reliably.

[Related: Machine Teaching: How Schools Are Using AI in Education]

Jason Lopez: Then there’s AI. Mason said there are a lot of things coming at it at breakneck speed, or as he stated in the press conference, it’s when everyone’s running around with their hair on fire.

Justin Mason: But from a teaching point of view, it’s not new. We’ve had subjects in artificial intelligent and deep learning and machine learning for quite a number of years, and some of those subjects have been complimented by students using virtual desktops via Nutanix, powered by GPUs to give them the additional resources they need to do those subjects. So not exactly new in the academic world. And by leveraging Nutanix, that’s allowed the students to access to those resources from anywhere at any time. They don’t need to come into a specialized lab running big hulking machines. They can do it from a web browser on their normal machine, whether they’re on campus or at home.

Jason Lopez: He wrapped up with this comment. Organizations considering a shift from VMware to a HV often worry about reliability and skill requirements, but those experienced with VMware find a HV easy to manage due to Nutanix’s user-friendly design.

[Related: Nutanix CEO Paves Way for Those Leaving Broadcom VMware]

Justin Mason: What we found is if you’re good at VMware, then you’ll do AHV in your sleep, and that’s Nutanix credit for making it so easy to manage. So when we move from Hyper-V to a HV, that was a bit of a learning curve for us. But then once you learn it, you kind of learn it. We found them when we moved to a HV when we were doing the migration, and part of that migration was outsourced to Wipro. There’s not much pushback here, and they’re doing it really quick, and it was kind of like, well, I think they were seeing the benefits of moving to it. What about getting external resources in that you might need to help with Nutanix? We’ve never had to do that. We’ve never had to go looking. There’ll be times in the university where we’re doing certain projects or certain initiatives. We need to bring in a resource to do something specifically like a T Net expert or a Microsoft Dynamics expert. But we’ve never found ourself having to bring in a Nutanix expert, so to speak, because I guess that speaks for itself. It’s pretty easy to manage.

Jason Lopez: Justin Mason is the associate director of vendor and operations at the University of Canberra, located in Canberra, Australia. His press conference was recorded at 2024 dot-NEXT, which was held in Barcelona, Spain. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. Tech Barometer is a production of The Forecast. It’s at the forecast by nutanix.com where we’ve got technology articles, podcasts, and video for you to enjoy.

That’s theforecastbynutanix.com. Thanks for listening.

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