[JeremyNT]

You're right on the money. The magic of VMWare before is that it did enough for a low enough cost that it made sense for all sorts of orgs, even those that were quite cost sensitive.

But higher ed is weird for the reasons you mention.

To elaborate a bit: before commercialization, universities were a huge part of the early internet, and they invested heavily in datacenters and connectivity at a time when "the cloud" didn't exist.

They also have weird cost models and paying for power/cooling is sometimes done in a way that IT doesn't even account for that burden at all.

So to a large degree, shutting down on-prem stuff to move to "the cloud" has never made financial sense for unis, and they've always had to adapt to whatever datacenter tech has been required over the long decades.

That means they're staffed with people who never forgot how to run workloads directly on the metal, and aren't afraid to build it themselves rather than just move to a vendor. When it comes to the VMWare / Broadcom situation, "once bitten, twice shy" is going to be in the back of their minds - they know they'll be around for decades to come, and nobody wants to have to migrate early due to another rug pull.