Overall: Our students and teachers at the San Antonio de Padua School are happy and very grateful for ASTER V7 because it has allowed us to overcome the economic gap and access to the Internet to improve the education and progress in our town.
Advantages: The San Antonio de Padua School is located in Tambobamba Apurimac Peru, a remote area with technological limitations in terms of access to the Internet and access to computer equipment because of costs, especially transportation, which makes the prices of its acquisition very high. The school does not receive government support and currently has approximately 330 students for whom it was decided to implement a computer center so that they can have access to technology and access to the Internet. Because of the limitations mentioned above, especially in the economic aspect, last year we purchased 8 computers, which did not serve the 330 students, so we had to assign shifts of use, even so the students had to wait for days to access a computer, looking for solutions we found some options with vmware and other software that virtualized the computers, but they required more hardware resources, making our computers too slow and unusable. Looking for more solutions, we found ASTER V7, which promised to create more workstations just by adding peripherals such as monitors, keyboard and mouse, giving us up to 6 workstations for each computer. We were very hesitant to believe that this would be true, since we had already tried several software programs without any results. The distrust was even greater because in Peru we speak Spanish and because of the distance, but we still decided to try this solution and boy, did it surprise us a lot, it is easy to install and configure and compatible with Windows 11, which is the version we currently use. In addition, the support provided by ASTER V7 is available in different languages, such as Portuguese, English, Russian and Spanish, and they are very attentive and precise in the requests made to them via WhatsApp or email. ASTER V7 has become a great ally because the license cost is much lower than other virtualization software, and it allows you to save Internet bandwidth as well as money on purchasing computer equipment, as you only need to add monitors, keyboards and mice for each additional workstation. We are currently converting our 8 computers into 32 workstations for our students. They are not 100% provisioned yet, but we have had a 50% improvement in access for our students. We plan to implement another 32 workstations by 2025. ASTER V7 is highly recommended for use by educational institutions. We are currently using ASTER V7 daily because it is part of our students’ daily lessons, which is optimal for their development and also allows us to save on electricity consumption.
Cons: Some things to improve are the response time for questions or doubts, they take about a day, although I think it is because of the time zone. In my experience, I communicate from Peru in South America. Prices are a bit high for low-income countries and there are not many discounts for educational institutions.
Alternatives Considered: vSphere
Reasons for choosing ASTER: For its ease of implementation and performance with minimal hardware.
