This is not an official committee (yet). If you are interested, please contact haaijer@snt.

This document is never done. Please extend it with new learnings and choices as time goes on.

SNT has always been a big proponent of open source and self-hosting. Given the current (~2025) happenings in the US, decision makers in Europe and the UT are also starting to share these ideas.

We have been focusing on roughly 4 separate subprojects. Some will be broken out when they get bigger:

For the last ~8 years SNT has been running an oVirt cluster to provide virtual machines to associations at the university and for it's own projects. Since the software is not very maintained anymore, we are looking at alternatives. The research done for this might also help other organisations with the options of VM hosting outside of the big commercial clouds. As of writing, no definite option has been chosen yet. But it will likely end up between Cloudstack, Incus or Proxmox

Some evaluated options:

• Proxmox
  • Very popular, good documentation
  • UI is quite clunky
  • Multiple SNT'ers have experience with this. Some bad some good
  • Missing some nice to haves such as reinstalls, cloudinit scripts
• Cloudstack
  • Less popular but seems to be growing
  • More cloud-based, so end users can make their own VMs on demand
  • We need to look into this more.
• Openstack
  • By far the most features
  • also more cloud-based
  • Hard to maintain due to it's size. Not suggestedd.
• oVirt
  • Using Gluster is preferred, but this seems quite buggy
  • Seems to break in weird ways
  • Not recommended.
• Incus
  • Some SNT'ers are very positive about this.
  • Need to look more into this
• OpenNebula
  • Starting to gain some traction again aswell
  • No experience with it
  • Differences between enterprise and community edition unclear
• Custom libvirt-based
  • Requires development work
  • Not preferred, but possible

TODO: Matrix, Mattermost, Discord, Simplex, UT situation, etc

Within the University of Twente, many technical studies used to have a Discord group for every module for students to communicate with eachother and with teachers for questions. This was a great way to get faster support from peers and enabled a searchable and accessible platform.

Since end of 2025, the UT has decided to ban the use of Discord. This is not completely unfair since it's an American platform likely owned by Tencent (chinese state). Unfortunately, no good alternative was given.

One department was already running mattermost and was happy with that. Unfortunately, due to licensing this is not an easy option. Most departments switched to teams, but this is has worse UX and is still Microsoft.

SNT has been running a large matrix server for a few years. First publicly and then later limited to Dutch universities. While there are some technical problems with the main server implementation Synapse, the UI/UX is described as “Not worse than M$ teams”.

SNT is currently evaluating options for onboarding other associations, and perhaps even helping the UT set up an instance as the main chat platform for student communication.

WIP. It would be nice to offer an office suite to associations that is not google or microsoft, and perhaps roll that out to the full UT.

All using Kubernetes:

• Opendesk
  • Most complete.
  • German government project
  • COllection of pre-existing software. Mainly nextcloud, openproject, matrix, collabora
• LaSuite
  • Some pre-existing software but also a lot of custom programs
  • Personal opinion: Better UI
  • No official deployment options
• MijnBureau
  • Dutch government
  • Combination of LaSuite and Opendesk components
  • Looks quite promising
  • Deployment as of writing only supports openshift. K8S support is broken but this should be fixed soon.

SNT has a workstation GPU available in the room for anyone wanting to experiment with running local LLM's. It can run deepseek etc. at decent speeds.

Local LLM's do not yet have the quality that the big commercial ones do, partially due to hardware limits and partially due to the models. They do however get quite close.

The UT (LISA+EEMCS) are working on procuring some GPU's to set up a local LLM for UT students and researchers. If necessary it might also be possible to lend some unused compute from one of the research groups?

This issue needs work on two levels: Operational and Strategic. Us technies will mostly focus on the operational side, but keep in mind that what you setup will be used by more people than just you. We need something easy to use stable, and open. This is what the decision makers high up care about.

If you are related to a Dutch university and would like a free VM / physical machine to test new projects, SNT can help you!