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BrianKirsch

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Aug 8, 2024
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Good Afternoon,

With VMware dumping the virtual academy many colleges are now in need of a virtualization platform to teach. I am hoping someone from Proxmox sees this and reaches out to me because it would be a great change to get in front of new IT students and really expose them to your product.
 
Since our products are freely available, licensed under the AGPLv3, there are no barriers to access them and build a course.

If you have more ideas or requests, feel free to contact us at office@proxmox.com.
The forum isn't necessarily the best place :)
 
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Good Morning,

I did send a email to that address and have not gotten a response which is why I posted here. I would love to talk to someone about this, it's a great chance for Proxmox to replace VMware in higher education at thousands of schools world wide if they move on it quickly.

Brian
 
Ah okay. As you can imagine, since December there is quite a bit going on, and it might take a bit until your email will be processed.
 
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I understand but please keep in mind with VMware just closing the academy this week it is time sensative. So here is a few thoughts for your teams.

Announce a Proxmox College Academy Subscription - Free for the first year for former VMware Academies ($200-$250) a year after that. It's a dig at VMware but worth it. What this gives you is the official courseware from Proxmox to be used in a college setting (the fee is to keep the materials up to date).

You will have to provide a teachers only discussion board (via account verification) where teachers can download the two main class materials
Allow faculty to upload content as well to share LMS content. I volunteer to create learning management system (LMS) quizzes faculty can use for their classes in conjunction with your slide materials for free to get you started.

Labs can be done in the classroom on hardware or virtual box (since the software is free) but the recommended solution is NDG (Netlab) as another college has already made labs with documentation for any current Netlab customer. Labs outside of Netlab would not have documentation to start, I am sure another college would be willing to write those.

So your real costs, open the official materials to educators, create a secure discussion board section, collect $200 after you pass go, any marketing materials you would want. Not a bad ask for getting in on the ground floor of colleges that gives you great exposure to new admins.

Just a random deployment plan...
 
So the good folks at Proxmox are interested but don't have the resources / time. I get it, higher education is often not on the radar for most places. I really don't think it would have taken a lot of effort to get this off of the ground but it is what it is. I ended up finding a solution from Ascend that has a course I can use that covers VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V. It will work for the colleges so I shared it with our college community. The bummer is once we adopt this most colleges will not change to something else, I mentioned this was time sensitive. Bummer that it didn't work out...
 
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BrianKirsch said:
I really don't think it would have taken a lot of effort to get this off of the ground but it is what it is.
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Why don't you do it yourself then ;)

BrianKirsch said:
I ended up finding a solution from Ascend that has a course I can use that covers VMware, Citrix and Hyper-V.
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That just means that VMware/Broadcom, Citrix and Microsoft are ALSO NOT interested in "higher education", or you would have courses from them. I would complain to Ascend why they do not offer a Proxmox VE course.
 
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I offered to create tests based on their slides and course outcome summaries for free, it was a no go. It's always better to get it directly from a vendor, but again most don't care about higher education except Cisco. And 2 year technical colleges teach 150-200 hours of it to new IT people, any wonder why they have such a following?
 
BrianKirsch said:
I offered to create tests based on their slides and course outcome summaries for free, it was a no go.
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I think you did your best. It's a shame because when you think of it, platform like PVE would be best suited for teaching even the underlying concepts, not just drone-like single-solution specific follow-instructions. It used to be, that some of the students would end up contributing code to such projects.

BrianKirsch said:
It's always better to get it directly from a vendor, but again most don't care about higher education except Cisco. And 2 year technical colleges teach 150-200 hours of it to new IT people, any wonder why they have such a following?
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They do not have any issue with promotion, or resources, though. The "most" do not care also for their customers now, let alone students.
 
I don't get it: You can already use Proxmox, just tell your students to ignore the "no subscription" nagging. The smarter ones will quickly find out how to remove it anyhow ;)
Concerning materials for teachers/classboard forums etc: I don't get it either. The documentation is freely available and every education facility I encountered in my live already has a plattform where students and teachers/lecturers can upload material/solutions to exercises/discuss things.

So what do you actually want which can't be achieved with the freely available ressources?

Please don't take this as a diss: I really would like to understand your usecase and needs since I don't see the point.

They do not have any issue with promotion, or resources, though. The "most" do not care also for their customers now, let alone students.
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I guess they want to concentrate on their current paying customers (especially the higher support tiers), and extending their partner network (which wil be needed to give the people migrating off from vmware the support they expect) a since that's more likely improve their net profit more. And last but not least: Actually developing new features for PVE.
I can't blame them tbh: At the moment the biggest reason my employer sticks with Vmware for the next three years (at least maybe more) is not that we are happy to pay the new prices but that (still) some features are missing in PVE and the offered support options. So it makes sense to work on this biggest obtacles for an adoption of current potential customers instead of investing time and resources in reaching out to potential customers after current students finished their education. You can only do so much with limited resources and Proxmox Server Solutions resources are obviouvsly a lot lower than Vmware, Nutanix or Microsoft. This is not a diss either, just an educated guess based on the known facts of the company size and structure.
If I had any say in it we would have switched to PVE+Ceph yesterday.
 
What we needed was the official slides from Promox to use in the classroom, we cannot simply make materials quickly in the classroom when a set of slides might be 70-90 pages each week / chapter. There is a lot more to teaching a class than just grabbing materials that can't be natively shown in class easily.
 
I still don't get it, sorry. Most of the slides my college lecturers used were made by them ( and yes their pages were in a similiar range) instead of e.g. from the companys who published the textbooks. None of them were "offiziell slides from Oracle" for the lectures on programming in Java or designing relational databases. They did reuse them later ( e.g. at the next term with the same course they didn't remade them from scratch but edited the old slides, correcting errors, make stuff easier to understand etc )
Of course this is work and I understand you don't want to do this but why should Proxmos Server Solutions do this instead of using their resources for stuff more likely to enable growth and profit?
 
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When you teach a vendors content you typically look to the vendor or a 3rd party to provide you accurate information. Sure I could do it, but I don't get paid for it to help spread the word about a vendor. How is that fair that Proxmox gets the benefit of my labor and students knowing their content and I don't get anything? Cisco is the best example, they spend 20 million a year on classes and content for colleges and what do the schools do in return, turn out thousands of students that will only use Cisco gear. Cisco like Apple realized the power of putting technology in the schools and what it brings back to the bottom li
 
BrianKirsch said:
When you teach a vendors content you typically look to the vendor or a 3rd party to provide you accurate information.
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You are spot on and lots of people forget it's also putting one's reputation on line. Imagine you pass on this and that piece of information from a wiki page (which changes how the wind blows), only that to be found defective.

BrianKirsch said:
Sure I could do it, but I don't get paid for it to help spread the word about a vendor. How is that fair that Proxmox gets the benefit of my labor and students knowing their content and I don't get anything?
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This is the first time someone actually dared to bring this up on the forum, I can't believe my eyes. I asked the same packaged differently in terms of contributing works [1] - I got both attention of staff and silent treatment at the same time. Think of it for a moment, I am encouraged to "contribute", but it needs to be sub-licenseable (so that they could repackage it into pure commercial license the next day if they want to).

So now I have an modified component that I could share back, but unless I am going to provide service with it to customers, I do not have to. Now even if I do publish it under AGPL out of goodness of heart, they will not take it in out of abundance of caution. :D There's no remuneration section of the Contributor Agreement. ;)

BrianKirsch said:
Cisco is the best example, they spend 20 million a year on classes and content for colleges and what do the schools do in return, turn out thousands of students that will only use Cisco gear. Cisco like Apple realized the power of putting technology in the schools and what it brings back to the bottom li
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Consider one more thing, Proxmox are a rather boutique company, if they started to become very popular, a big player will offer something that the majority shareholder would not be able to reject and there goes your "alternative", so maybe everyone here should be happy they are not punching above their weight, in this sense.

[1] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/contributor-license-agreement-agpl.153198/
 
Johannes S said:
I guess they want to concentrate on their current paying customers (especially the higher support tiers), and extending their partner network (which wil be needed to give the people migrating off from vmware the support they expect) a since that's more likely improve their net profit more. And last but not least: Actually developing new features for PVE.
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So this was at me, I guess. (I was actually referring to the others, not Proxmox in that sentence.)I really do not have anything to say what a private company decides to adapt as their business strategy, literally anything goes. It's not even Proxmox taking me for a ride, though silence also communicates a lot, it's often the "supporters" that do.

Johannes S said:
I can't blame them tbh: At the moment the biggest reason my employer sticks with Vmware for the next three years (at least maybe more) is not that we are happy to pay the new prices but that (still) some features are missing in PVE and the offered support options. So it makes sense to work on this biggest obtacles for an adoption of current potential customers instead of investing time and resources in reaching out to potential customers after current students finished their education. You can only do so much with limited resources and Proxmox Server Solutions resources are obviouvsly a lot lower than Vmware, Nutanix or Microsoft. This is not a diss either, just an educated guess based on the known facts of the company size and structure.
If I had any say in it we would have switched to PVE+Ceph yesterday.
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No you would not, the quality is not there, the culture is not there, the guarantees are not there and no CTO that was used to that level can tolerate e.g.: https://bugzilla.proxmox.com/show_bug.cgi?id=5759
 
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