Campus cloud infrastructure
without the licensing crisis.
Universities are leaving VMware. MultiPortal gives your institution the multi-tenant management layer it needs on Proxmox, with faculty isolation, self-service VMs, and cost transparency built in.
VMware walked away from education. Your infrastructure still needs to run.
Broadcom's acquisition of VMware eliminated academic licensing programs, introduced 72-core subscription minimums, and pushed education sector costs up by multiples. Universities that relied on VMware Cloud Director for multi-tenant infrastructure management now face a choice: absorb unpredictable costs, or move to a platform designed for the way institutions actually operate.
Proxmox VE has emerged as the hypervisor of choice for higher education. It's open-source, production-grade, and free from per-core licensing. But a hypervisor alone doesn't give you tenant isolation, self-service portals, or per-faculty resource accounting. MultiPortal does.
How MultiPortal serves higher education.
Capabilities built for institutions running multi-tenant infrastructure across schools, faculties, and research groups.
Faculty and Department Isolation
Every school, faculty, or research group gets its own tenant with dedicated Virtual Data Centres, resource quotas, network isolation, and access controls. Engineering doesn't consume the Health Sciences allocation. Central IT retains full visibility across all tenants from one dashboard.
Self-Service VM Provisioning
Researchers and lab administrators deploy VMs from approved templates. No tickets, no delays. Pre-configured images for teaching labs, research workloads, and development environments are available through the self-service portal.
Grant-Based Resource Accounting
Track compute, storage, and network consumption per faculty, per department, per research grant. Built-in usage reporting means finance gets accurate data for cost allocation, without spreadsheets.
LDAP, SAML, and OAuth Integration
Connect to your existing campus identity provider. Automatic provisioning via JIT means staff and researchers get access through the systems they already use.
No Per-Core Licensing
Proxmox VE has no per-core fees. MultiPortal pricing is per CPU socket, with no 72-core minimums, no forced bundling, and no late renewal penalties. A free Community edition covers up to four sockets for smaller departments and labs. Budget predictability, year over year.
Migration-Ready
Moving from VMware? Import existing VMs into MultiPortal, powered on or offline. Migrate incrementally, validate workloads, and cut over on your schedule.
How universities use MultiPortal.
Teaching Labs
Provision isolated lab environments for each course. Students access pre-built VM templates for networking, cybersecurity, software engineering, or data science, without touching production infrastructure.
Research Computing
Give research groups self-service access to spin up compute resources for simulations, data analysis, or machine learning workloads. Track usage against specific grants and funding codes.
Shared Administrative Infrastructure
Run ERP, student information systems, library platforms, and other institutional applications across isolated tenants. Each tenant has its own backup policies, resource quotas, and access controls.
IT Training and Certification
Replace discontinued VMware IT Academy lab access with Proxmox-based training environments managed through MultiPortal. Students learn virtualisation concepts on infrastructure that reflects where the industry is heading.
The shift is already happening.
Stanford University migrated approximately 1,500 virtual machines from VMware to Proxmox, citing cost predictability and automation as key drivers. Colleges across the US and Australia are rewriting virtualisation curricula around Proxmox. The hypervisor shift is underway. MultiPortal is the management layer that makes it operational at scale.
MultiPortal vs VMware Cloud Director for education.
A side-by-side look at how the two platforms compare for institutional infrastructure.
| Capability | VMware Cloud Director | MultiPortal |
|---|---|---|
| Hypervisor | vSphere (proprietary, per-core licensed) | Proxmox VE (open-source, no per-core fees) |
| Academic pricing | Discontinued | Accessible, with no minimums |
| Multi-tenancy | Organisation VDCs | Tenant-level VDCs with quotas |
| Self-service portal | Yes | Yes |
| Usage tracking | Requires vRealize (additional cost) | Built in |
| Identity integration | LDAP, SAML | LDAP, SAML, OAuth with JIT provisioning |
| VM migration | N/A (incumbent) | Import VMware VMs directly |
| Vendor lock-in | High | Low. Open-source hypervisor, open APIs |
| White-label / branding | Via VCSP program (discontinued for most) | Basic on Standard; full on Premium (v1.2) |
Infrastructure funding should go to research, not licensing.
See how MultiPortal delivers enterprise cloud management for your campus, on Proxmox, without the VMware overhead.