When Broadcom acquired VMware, they killed educational licensing. For our 6-node cluster running 196 cores, staying meant $68,600 a year.
I’m a lab assistant at a community college. That’s not happening.
The Math That Made the Decision
Broadcom moved to subscription-only pricing at $350+ per core. They terminated the VMware IT Academy program that gave us free educational licensing. Overnight, our infrastructure went from $0 to $68,600 annually.
Proxmox VE runs the same KVM/QEMU hypervisor tech, does enterprise clustering, and costs exactly nothing. AGPLv3 license. We own our infrastructure again.
| Metric | VMware (Broadcom) | Proxmox VE |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Cost | ~$68,600 | $0 |
| 5-Year TCO | ~$343,000 | $0 |
| License Model | Per-core subscription | Open source (AGPLv3) |
That table is the entire argument.
What I Actually Did
This wasn’t a committee project. I was the workhorse.
I physically installed 10 Gigabit PCIe NICs in all six Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers. Ran the cable infrastructure for a dedicated 10G management network. Configured LACP bonding (802.3ad) across all onboard gigabit NICs. Built the Proxmox cluster, broke it learning Corosync, rebuilt it correctly.
Then I integrated it with NETLAB+ for educational lab delivery and documented every port, cable run, and configuration.
Things That Broke
The Proxmox 9 Incident. I upgraded to Proxmox 9 and everything died. NETLAB+‘s packages were built for Debian Bookworm (12). Proxmox 9 runs on Trixie (13). Library incompatibilities cascaded through the whole stack. Rolled back, pinned to Proxmox 8, learned to always check upstream dependencies before upgrading.
Corosync. The heartbeat of a Proxmox cluster. Misconfigure ring addresses and nodes can’t see each other. Cluster splits, quorum fails. The dedicated 10G network wasn’t a luxury. It was a requirement for stable cluster communication.
Bonding vs. Etherchannel. Linux bonding and Cisco Etherchannel are conceptually identical but configured differently on each end. I spent a solid afternoon figuring out why one NIC was saturated while three others sat idle. Hash policies. That afternoon taught me more about networking than any certification course.
Current Status
Six nodes running NETLAB+ lab pods for cybersecurity and networking students. Live migration works. HA failover works. Students don’t know or care what hypervisor runs underneath. They just know their labs are available.
The infrastructure that Broadcom thought they could hold hostage is now completely under our control. For $0.