Case Study: University of Groningen maximizes IT utilization and accelerates research with VMware vSphere and ESXi

University Establishes Platform To Drive Global Research Ambitions

The University of Groningen, a research-led international university in the Netherlands, needed to make better use of IT capacity across three data centers—where up to 30% of resources sat idle—and provide researchers with secure, compliant, high-performance infrastructure for machine learning, AI and other HPC workloads. The challenge was to simplify management, automate provisioning, and offer self-service access so research teams could move from months-long waits to immediate, repeatable environments.

UG unified its data centers on a VMware ESXi and vSphere 6.7 platform to deliver a “Research as a Service” model with automated provisioning, GPU support and improved APIs. The result is higher resource utilization, lower costs, faster time-to-value, secure and portable research environments that host mission-critical HPC frameworks (e.g., Gromacs, TensorFlow, Caffe, Relion, AmberTools), enable rolling hardware upgrades, and foster a culture of IT and institutional innovation.

University of Groningen

Gemma van der Voorst

Virtualization Specialist