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		<title>Success Stories from Proxmox customers &amp; users</title>
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			<title>Proxmox VE as the basis for locally hosted AI services</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/otris-software</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ As a leading provider of software solutions for digitization in companies, otris software AG relies on Proxmox VE to offer privacy-friendly AI services. The company operates locally hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) in virtual machines using NVIDIA GPUs. Thanks to the robustness and flexibility of Proxmox VE, operation is guaranteed even if a server fails. When otris software AG planned to integrate AI functions into its products to optimize document management and exploit the full potential of the available data, one of the biggest challenges was to operate Large Language Models (LLMs) securely in a private cloud managed by a subsidiary, otris systems GmbH, in three German data centers. According to Dr. Christoph Niemann, co-founder and CEO of otris software AG, key requirements had to be met to implement a powerful and privacy-friendly solution: Replication between two data centers should ensure load balancing and reliability, the use of virtual machines should provide a flexible environment for the LLMs, and the direct assignment of NVIDIA H100 GPUs to virtual machines via PCIe passthrough should enable dynamic GPU utilization. Flexibility and reliability with Proxmox VE Proxmox VE proved to be the ideal solution for these requirements, as it enables the reliable and efficient management of virtual instances. The ease of use and robust architecture of Proxmox VE allows for flexible use and scaling. ZFS enables fast and efficient storage replication. In practical use, the solution proved to be extremely stable and reliable, and the installation and operation of Proxmox VE on Supermicro hardware went smoothly. Failover with two identically configured systems Two identically configured Supermicro 4125GS-TNRT systems were used for the implementation, each equipped with two AMD EPYC 9654 processors with 96 cores, 1.5 TB DDR5 RAM and a capacity of up to eight GPUs per server. The network structure is based on a 10GbE connection for external connections and a separate 100GbE network for internal communication. The GPUs are forwarded directly to the VMs via PCIe passthrough. An unexpected defect in the mainboard of one of the two servers revealed the high performance of the solution: thanks to the flexible infrastructure, the virtual machine was quickly transferred to the second server, the available GPU was integrated, and operations were resumed within a very short time. This area illustrates the strong innovative power of Proxmox, since Proxmox VE is an NVIDIA vGPU supported hypervisor, and from version 8.4 even allows the live migration of “mediated devices” such as NVIDIA vGPUs, increasing reliability even further. Maximum scalability and optimal use of resources The long-term benefits of implementing Proxmox VE are manifold. The virtualization solution offers maximum scalability, as the existing server design can be expanded with additional GPUs at any time. In addition, Proxmox VE enables optimal resource utilization through dynamic distribution of CPU cores, RAM, and GPUs, ensuring particularly precise and efficient use of the hardware. In addition, the open-source solution from Proxmox allows considerable cost savings, as licensing costs are eliminated and investments can flow more specifically into high-performance hardware. The environment remains flexible and future-proof, as it can be easily expanded and adapted to new requirements. Another advantage for otris software AG is the stability of Proxmox VE: the continuous updates ensure secure operation with minimal downtime. Future-proof platform for AI based on Proxmox VE The combination of Proxmox VE and powerful hardware offers otris software AG a reliable, cost-efficient, and future-proof platform for AI-supported processes. Thanks to Proxmox VE’s high scalability, flexibility and stability, the company is ideally equipped to continue using innovative technologies efficiently in the future. The combination of Proxmox VE and powerful hardware offers otris software AG a reliable, cost-efficient, and future-proof platform for AI-supported processes. Dr. Christoph Niemann, Co-founder and CEO “It was important to us that customers of our otris legal suite have a choice: To use the common AI models at the well-known hosters or to use a local AI so that customer data does not leave the otris systems,” says Dr. Christoph Niemann. “For the latter, we take advantage of our own LLM on Proxmox VE with NVIDIA GPU cards in our own environment, which is maintained completely by our colleagues at otris systems GmbH.” In the future, the company is going to continue to rely on the versatility and innovative power of Proxmox VE. There are already plans to switch from storage replication with ZFS to the distributed storage system Ceph to improve real-time replication between data centers, which will significantly increase redundancy and operational reliability. Dr. Christoph Niemann Co-founder and CEO About otris software AG As a leading provider of software solutions for digitization, otris software AG supports companies on their path to digitalization. Its software solutions are based on its own platform for document-centric business processes which makes complex issues transparent and enables well-founded decisions. Its specialist solutions support decision-makers in efficiently fulfilling their management responsibilities in the areas of legal & administration, compliance, and data protection. They are characterized by a high level of usability and integrate state-of-the-art technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to meet the highest demands. About Proxmox partner: otris systems GmbH Since 2003 otris systems GmbH has been offering customized solutions in the field of open-source software. The company focuses on needs-based consulting, transparent implementation, and the sustainable and secure operation of IT infrastructure and applications. By operating its own hosting environments, otris systems is able to implement individual cloud solutions according to customer specifications. At the same time, operation of on-premises infrastructure is equally one of the core competencies of otris systems GmbH. Complex hybrid environments that combine the advantages of both worlds are therefore just as much a part of the day-to-day business of otris systems as the support of individual systems. More at: https://otris.systems ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 21 Aug 2025 10:30:01 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Farmácia Nova da Maia achieves High Availability with Proxmox VE and ZFS</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/farmacia-nova-da-maia</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ When the Portuguese online pharmacy Farmácia Nova da Maia faced challenges with its previous hypervisor environment, a new solution based on Proxmox VE, ZFS, and Proxmox Backup Server significantly improved both online and internal performance, ensuring seamless operations and efficient data management. Farmácia Nova da Maia is the most visited and a highly respected online pharmacy in Portugal. Since its inception, the pharmacy has invested in technology, choosing open-source solutions wherever possible. Rapid growth and the need for high performance The company’s rapid growth over the years required an overhaul of its IT server infrastructure. The pharmacy had previously operated in a different hypervisor environment, but as costs increased, it became clear that a new solution was necessary. The goal was clear: to achieve superior performance, high availability (HA), flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, all while remaining aligned with the company’s commitment to technological innovation. The pharmacy’s IT manager F. Moreira explains: “Our vision has always been to offer not only high-quality products and services to our customers but also a truly positive experience for our employees. Technology has always been a central pillar of our operations, driving our continuous growth. We needed a solution that could meet this challenge by providing exceptional performance while also being highly cost-efficient.” High availability with Proxmox VE and ZFS To improve performance and reliability, Farmácia Nova da Maia implemented a two-node Proxmox VE cluster, with one QDevice, running on brand-new HPE servers equipped with state-of-the-art NVMe PCIe 5.0 drives. ZFS is used for storage replication between the nodes. This approach, which eliminates the need for centralized storage, was chosen for its cost-effectiveness, good performance, and to avoid over-engineering. Additionally, to protect data and ensure rapid recovery in case of failure, the pharmacy deploys Proxmox Backup Server with an offsite backup plan. The combination of Proxmox VE, ZFS, and Proxmox Backup Server has been crucial in ensuring we have a robust IT infrastructure to support our operations. F. Moreira, IT-Manager The ZFS replication between the nodes takes place over a 50 Gbps network, with some virtual machines being replicated every 5 minutes. This minimizes data loss in case of catastrophic failure and ensures compliance with the company’s HA and business continuity policies. “We opted for a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-manage solution. The combination of Proxmox VE, ZFS, and Proxmox Backup Server has been crucial in ensuring we have a robust IT infrastructure to support our operations,” says F. Moreira. Business continuity and data protection The implementation of Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server has significantly improved Farmácia Nova da Maia’s performance, both for online customers and internal operations, ensuring seamless operations and efficient data management. The ZFS replication between nodes, combined with the high-speed 50 Gbps network, guarantees business continuity and the protection of critical data—an essential feature for a pharmacy managing large volumes of online transactions and serving a global customer base. F. Moreira IT-Manager About Farmácia Nova da Maia Founded in 2015, Farmácia Nova da Maia is the most visited and a highly respected online pharmacy in Portugal, distinguished by its departure from the traditional pharmacy model in the country. Since its inception, the pharmacy has invested in technology, choosing open-source solutions wherever possible. This approach has been a key factor in its continuous growth and success. Today, it is the most visited Portuguese pharmacy worldwide, serving customers globally. Its technological strategy has positioned it ahead of Portuguese competitors. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jun 2025 17:11:54 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Squark migrates IaaS solutions to Proxmox VE</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/squark</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ Squark is a french provider of high-performance web hosting and infrastructure consulting. To reduce costs and gain flexibility the company migrated its IaaS solutions from VMware vSphere to Proxmox VE already back in 2015. As an IaaS provider, Squark needs to deliver a dependable, secure, high-performing, scalable, and adaptable infrastructure to ensure highly available services, all while providing excellent customer support. “Our customers rely on our infrastructure for their critical operations, so high availability (HA) and minimal downtime are crucial”, says Julien Houzeaux, CTO at Squark. “Redundancy in servers, storage, and networks is crucial to prevent service disruptions.” The company’s virtualization infrastructure handles thousands of virtual machines, distributed over several regions and availability zones, each corresponding to 2000 computing cores and 30TB of RAM. “Back in 2015, the expansion of our business challenged our economic model due to the very high costs associated with operating the VMware solutions vCloud, vSphere and ESXi version 5”, remembers Julien Houzeaux. Two virtualization technologies for improved efficiency Squark found Proxmox VE to be an excellent solution to meet these challenges since it combines reliability, flexibility, and economical pricing. Its open-source nature eliminates licensing fees, and optional enterprise support is available. “The Proxmox virtualization stack is less resource-intensive than that of VMware”, says Julien Houzeaux. “This allowed us to use less powerful hardware more efficiently and to extend the lifespan of existing hardware.” “Proxmox VE provides us with increased flexibility for different workloads because of its integration of two different kinds of virtualization technologies, KVM for virtual machines, and Linux containers (LXC) for container-based virtualization. Furthermore, advanced features like high availability, live migration, and software-defined storage (SDS) are included by default.” Smooth migration Today, Squark’s whole implementation of Proxmox VE is running on an HPE Synergy composable infrastructure based on an HPE Synergy 12000 Frame. “From the beginning of the migration project, the technical team has been very confident regarding compatibility and reliability of running Proxmox VE on our HPE ecosystem, as we ran a lot of benchmarks over HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 servers, and it was working like a charm”, remembers Julien Houzeaux. The company successfully deployed Proxmox VE for the first time in production in 2015. Following this initial deployment, Proxmox VE gradually replaced Squark’s deployment of the VMware suite. As the complete transition took place in 2016 and there were no advanced migration tools available, an internal workflow had been developed to manage and schedule the V2V (virtual to virtual) migration of the virtual machines to the new clusters. Today, Proxmox VE comes with an integrated Import Wizard for the direct import of guests from other hypervisors. When the company prepared for the migration, they relied on the extensive project documentation of Proxmox VE, the active community, and technical support, as Julien Houzeaux points out: “The documentation of Proxmox VE is easy to access and use. We have deployed several clusters in a couple of days. The community has also been very active and responsive during our migration project and ever since. Finally, technical support from Proxmox was proactive and helpful during our testing and production phases.” Proxmox VE increases flexibility By migrating to Proxmox VE, Squark met the challenges the company faced with VMware's licensing model which had led to high operating costs that had become unsustainable when Squark expanded its infrastructure. Proxmox VE offers us a degree of flexibility that VMware could not match: The combination of two virtualization technologies, KVM and LXC, allows us to choose the best solution for each workload. Furthermore, Proxmox VE proves to be highly adaptable, since the absence of vendor lock-in gives us the freedom to customize our environment to our specific needs. Julien Houzeaux, CTO Being an open-source solution, Proxmox VE comes without licensing costs. This had a direct and positive impact on the company’s budget. “We were able to reallocate these resources to other strategic projects,” says Julien Houzeaux. “Proxmox VE offers us a degree of flexibility that VMware could not match. The combination of two virtualization technologies, KVM and LXC, allows us to choose the best solution for each workload. Furthermore, Proxmox VE proved to be highly adaptable, since the absence of vendor lock-in gives us the freedom to customize our environment to our specific needs.” The comprehensive range of the Proxmox VE enterprise features proved to be a significant asset for Squark. Julien Houzeaux: “Essential features such as high availability and live migration, which were previously costly options in VMware, are integrated in Proxmox VE by default. The integration of different storage solutions strengthened our storage infrastructure, offering better performance and greater reliability.” Squark has been relying on Proxmox VE for almost ten years now to support its business operations and CTO Julien Houzeaux already has plans for future developments with Proxmox solutions: “We keep an attentive eye on Proxmox Datacenter Manager, as it could improve our global management and business model.” Julien Houzeaux CTO About Squark Squark leads a fierce and unique philosophy in IaaS provisioning – high availability is a requirement. Founded in 2014, the company has its headquarters in Paris, France and a staff of 15 employees. Squark offers high-performance web hosting, infrastructure consulting, and optimization services with effective guaranteed fault repair times (GRTs) of up to one hour. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:57:27 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>MSI Surfaces diversifies HA infrastructure</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/msi-surfaces</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ MSI recently undertook a major migration from VMware to Proxmox Virtual Environment for their high-availability (HA) infrastructure. This transition was driven by the need to implement a cost-effective, open-source, and scalable virtualization solution without sacrificing performance or reliability. Since the migration, the company has experienced significant improvements in flexibility, operational efficiency, and cost savings. MSI, leading distributor of flooring, countertop, wall tile, and hardscaping products in North America, runs its self-hosted IT services on premises in two separate colocation centers. The company has a cluster of 10 Dell PowerEdge R760 for production, 3 PowerEdge R750 for staging and 3 PowerEdge R630 for development and testing. All systems are deployed as a hyper-converged Ceph cluster, with about 150 VMs in total. The hosted services include web servers, load balancers, SQL servers, containers, and a whole suite of Windows/Linux servers that support the company’s daily operations. Why MSI Surfaces opted for strategic diversification Karan Vashi, systems engineer at MSI, explains the situation the company was in before migrating to Proxmox VE: “While VMware provided a stable virtualization platform, we encountered several challenges. High licensing costs escalated with scaling needs, vendor lock-in limited our customization and integration capabilities and the complex licensing structure required costly add-ons for full HA functionality.” “While our production systems continue to run on VMware, we have strategically separated our infrastructure to reduce costs and avoid reliance on a single technology. Our high-availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and test environments now run on Proxmox VE with Ceph, providing a scalable and cost-effective solution.” HA and scalability with Ceph storage The company evaluated various alternatives before selecting Proxmox VE for a number of key reasons. First, its open-source nature eliminates expensive licensing fees. Second, its built-in HA and clustering features provide robust failover mechanisms. Third, its seamless integration with Ceph storage ensures HA and scalability. “We also opted for a subscription for Proxmox Backup Server in addition to Proxmox VE’s built in snapshot features to enhance our disaster recovery strategies”, says Karan Vashi. “Proxmox VE’s web-based management interface simplifies our operations and reduces our administrative overhead.” Minimal downtime during migration The transition was executed in stages to ensure minimal downtime. During the initial planning and testing stage the company deployed a test cluster to evaluate the performance and compatibility of the Proxmox products. “When we started the migration of data and VMs we used tools like virt-v2v, manual VM exports, and, where possible, live migrations. Later, we leveraged Veeam’s backup and restore features to transition directly from VMware to Proxmox VE”, explains Karan Vashi. “For the Ceph storage deployment we implemented a scalable Ceph cluster for redundant and high performance storage. We achieved our highly available setup by configuring HA groups in Proxmox VE, fencing, and failover strategies.” Reduced cost and improved performance The migration to Proxmox VE brought several measurable results, as Karan Vashi points out: “Since the migration, we have achieved a 75% cost reduction because we are no longer dependent on expensive licensing fees. We also benefit from increased scalability and flexibility since it’s easier to expand with open-source technologies.” Migrating to Proxmox VE has been a game-changer for our HA infrastructure. We now enjoy greater control, reduced costs, and improved performance without vendor restrictions. Karan Vashi, Systems Engineer The virtualization of Proxmox VE led to a better utilization of resources and to improved performance. Furthermore, Proxmox VE allows for simplified management with its unified web-based user interface. The company enhanced its high-availability infrastructure with seamless failover and redundancy with Ceph and the Proxmox HA features. “Migrating to Proxmox VE has been a game-changer for our HA infrastructure”, says Karan Vashi. “We now enjoy greater control, reduced costs, and improved performance without vendor restrictions. Proxmox VE has proven to be a powerful, reliable, and scalable alternative to proprietary solutions like VMware.” Karan Vashi Systems Engineer About MSI Surfaces Founded in 1975, MSI is the leading nationwide distributor of flooring, countertop, wall tile, and hardscaping products in North America. Headquartered in Orange, California, MSI maintains over 50 state-of-the-art showrooms and distribution centers across the U.S. and Canada, with domestically sourced products for Q™ Premium Natural Quartz in Latta, South Carolina, and Premium LVT in Cartersville, Georgia. MSI imports products from over 37 countries on six continents and has grown to over $2.5 billion in annual revenues and 3,700+ employees worldwide. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2025 10:52:27 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Emmecubo successfully migrates from VMware to Proxmox VE</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/emmecubo</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ Emmecubo, a web agency from Treviso, Italy, looked for an alternative virtualization solution to VMware to host its services. They were able to fully implement a more cost-effective solution based on Proxmox Virtual Environment in less than a month. Proxmox Gold Partner Seeweb provided crucial support in the decision making process and during implementation. The Italian web agency emmecubo was established in 2004 and is active in the development of e-commerce solutions, websites, and web marketing. The company previously used VMware to host its services on 30 virtual machines (VMs). Due to an increase in VMware’s licensing costs, the company sought an alternative virtualization solution. Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server with support options By migrating its whole infrastructure from VMware to Proxmox VE, emmecubo increased the flexibility, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of its IT infrastructure. They decided to invest in Proxmox VE Standard subscriptions and in a subscription for Proxmox Backup Server to secure the virtualization of their infrastructure with access to the stable Enterprise Repository and technical support directly from the Proxmox developers. Seeweb provided support during the migration process by providing security patches, updates, and diagnosis of possible issues in terms of security and performance. Flawless migration in less than a month The migration of emmecubo’s 30 VMs worked quickly, without any downtime in the agency’s services, thanks to the ease of use of Proxmox VE. During the migration process, emmecubo was in charge of creating the new VMs, of updating the nodes, and of all routine management tasks. With the help of Seeweb they achieved a high level of automation and easiness in the management and control of their infrastructure during the whole migration process. Massimo Tito, CEO of emmecubo, explains: “The greatest benefit of using Proxmox VE, beyond cost optimization, was the flexibility and the ability to operate directly alongside Proxmox Gold Partner Seeweb on the infrastructure and on some custom automation developed by emmecubo.” Increased efficiency Cost savings, greater flexibility, and the possibility to rapidly create new VMs are measurable results of emmecubo’s migration to Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server. The switch to the new virtualization solution brought better use of CPUs and memory, improved management of backups, high availability (HA), as well as new features like the restore of individual files from backups. The company can now invest more in their infrastructure due to the substantial savings in virtualization costs. Cost savings, greater flexibility, and the possibility to rapidly create new VMs are measurable results of emmecubo’s migration to Proxmox VE and Proxmox Backup Server. Massimo Tito, CEO, Co-Founder Seeweb continues to support emmecubo beyond the first phase of the migration and provides services covering infrastructure optimization and performance improvement. The migration from VMware to Proxmox VE was a full success for emmecubo. Virtualization based on Proxmox VE became a central part of emmecubo’s long-term IT strategy and the company is planning to expand its use in the future. Massimo Tito Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder About emmecubo s.r.l Emmecubo was founded in 2004 after gaining about ten years of experience in the web industry. The Italian web agency develops e-commerce solutions using CMS platforms such as WooCommerce and Magento, as well as websites, systems, and applications related to Artificial Intelligence. Emmecubo also offers web marketing services, graphic design, and GDPR privacy compliance and serves clients worldwide, primarily in Italy but also in Canada, Mexico, the USA, France, Germany, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom. About Proxmox partner: Seeweb Seeweb is a Cloud Computing Provider based in Italy. With its multiple data centers, Seeweb is able to provide reliable services to host IT projects that need high performance, security, and compliance. Founded in 1998, the Company is partof the Dominio Hosting Holding and supports itscustomers – mainly system integrators, software vendors, web agencies, AI companies – with public and private cloud infrastructures compliant with EU policies and totally powered by green energy. “We are happy to be a Proxmox Gold Partner because this gives us the opportunity to enlarge our offeringof Virtual Private Cloud services, thus meeting the needs of customers seeking a flexible and cost-effective private cloud environment.” ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 12 May 2025 11:22:12 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>French Health Insurance</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/french-health-insurance</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ The French Health Insurance needed to efficiently secure their critical email communications with clients. On weekdays, the organization processes peaks of over 130.000 emails per hour. Proxmox Mail Gateway now secures this critical mail flow, improving the usability for the institution's support teams. The French Health Insurance exists since 1945 and ensures access to healthcare for the french population, including employees and self-employed individuals. The “Caisse nationale de l'assurance maladie” (CNAM) oversees the network of organizations that make up the French Health Insurance (CPAM, UGECAM, etc.). With about 85,000 employees, including 2,500 CNAM employees, the organization has a high volume of interaction between employees and clients. On weekdays, the organization processes between 1 and 1.6 million of OTP communications, with peaks of over 130.000 emails per hour. The overall average is just over 1 million emails (each about 50kb) sent per day. To further secure their email communications and mitigate phishing and email spoofing, Frédéric AUCLAIR, project manager at the French Health Insurance, was looking for a new mail gateway solution for their organization as the one in use did not support DMARC compliance, was too costly, and could not enhance email tracking for better support responses. The Challenge “We needed to find a reliable and robust platform to send a large quantity of electronic messages to the Internet. When we had discovered Proxmox Mail Gateway on the French list of recommended open-source software for public agencies, the “socle interministériel de logiciels libres” (SILL), we were first concerned about high availability and performance. Nevertheless, the competitive pricing was a crucial factor in our decision to select the Proxmox Mail Gateway solution.” Integrate with the OTP system for two-factor authentication “Our goal was to implement an infrastructure dedicated to issuing one-time password (OTP) codes for two-factor authentication for users on the ameli.fr portal, in order to control this critical SMTP flow. For example, by limiting the duration of sending attempts in the event of failure; there is no point in trying for 5 days to send an OTP code only valid for 15 minutes." "Due to the critical nature of the service, we required a resilient solution. Moreover, it was essential for us to have a straightforward and efficient method of tracking the sending of these codes so that our support teams could respond rapidly.” The Implementation “Through the public procurement code, we were put in contact with DynFi, the Proxmox Gold partner in France, to help us with the implementation process. Grégory Bernard, CEO from DynFi, provided great expertise on the technical architecture, advised on traffic matrix, and specific configuration.” To support the implementation of Proxmox Mail Gateway, DynFi first performed an in-depth audit offering cutting-edge technical expertise on the underlying systems (mainly Postfix and SpamAssassin) of Proxmox Mail Gateway. Grégory Bernard: “Our project management support enabled the French Health Insurance to optimize the integration of the open-source email security solution, guaranteeing increased resilience and performance of their infrastructure. By joining forces and both our companies' expertise, CNAM now benefits from smooth, centralized management of some of its messaging services, while maximizing the efficiency of its IT infrastructure.” Overall, the implementation was a smooth and relatively easy process, according to Frédéric A.: “We only experienced a challenge with implementing inter-data center traffic. But all requests to the Proxmox enterprise support were answered immediately and successfully. Additionally, we found the community forum to be full of useful information and helpful users.” The Deployment The team around project manager Frédéric A. deployed a Proxmox Mail Gateway cluster consisting of virtual appliances. Historically, the underlying virtualization system at the data centers currently is still a VMware virtualization system. But in the future, the organization plans to evaluate if OpenStack or Proxmox Virtual Environment will be an alternative virtualization solution. “Proxmox Gold partner DynFi helped us to deploy a cluster consisting of nine nodes”, tells Frédéric, “with the first dedicated to the role of master in the intranet zone, and the other eight dedicated to outgoing SMTP traffic. The slave nodes handle DKIM signatures and TLS encryption.” Improved user experience with the Proxmox API By deploying the Proxmox Mail Gateway cluster across two data centers, behind an active/active load balancer, the French Health Insurance could achieve a very good level of resilience. Thanks to the Proxmox API, they could develop a site that allows their support teams to easily trace send attempts and the reasons for their failure: this greatly streamlines response times to complaints and significantly improves the quality of interactions. One of our favorites of Proxmox Mail Gateway is its centralized administration. The clarity of the interface adds even more strength to this open-source email security solution. Frédéric Auclair, Project Manager IT Development “One of our favorites of Proxmox Mail Gateway is its centralized administration”, explains Frédéric Auclair. “The clarity of the interface adds even more strength to this open-source email security solution.” "In the end, we feel that the team French Health Insurance + DynFi + Proxmox has formed a winning trio!" Frédéric Auclair Project Manager IT Development About the French Health Insurance The French Health Insurance exists since 1945 and ensures access to healthcare for the french population. The “Caisse nationale de l'assurance maladie” (CNAM) oversees the network of organizations that make up the French Health Insurance. With about 85,000 employees, including 2,500 CNAM employees, the organization has a high volume of interaction between employees and clients. About Proxmox partner: DynFi DynFi, the french Proxmox Gold partner, specializes in Proxmox project management and supports its clients in deploying, optimizing, and managing virtualized infrastructures. With strong expertise in networking, cybersecurity, and mail server solutions, DynFi provides tailored services that include compatible hardware and reliable data center hosting. More at: https://dynfi.com/proxmox/ ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:59:27 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Modernized central server and storage systems with Dell and Proxmox</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/sigmund-freud-private-university</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ The Sigmund Freud University (SFU) is the largest private university in Austria and has campuses in Linz, Berlin, Paris, Ljubljana and Milan in addition to Vienna. To support the diverse academic and administrative requirements of the institution and make them future-proof, the university decided to modernize its central IT infrastructure with the help of Proxmox Gold Partner Siedl Networks. The Sigmund Freud Private University was established in 2003 with the aim of establishing psychotherapy as a scientific discipline science at an academic level. After almost 80 years, Sigmund Freud's vision of establishing psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline in its own right has now been realized. Today, Sigmund Freud Private University (SFU) is the largest private university in Austria, offering a wide range of study programs at Bachelor's, Master's and doctoral level in psychotherapy science, psychology, human medicine, dentistry and law. As a transnational university, SFU has campuses in Linz, Berlin, Paris, Ljubljana and Milan in addition to Vienna. In the academic year 2023/2024, the university has more than 5,000 students from over 80 different countries. SFU's outpatient clinics and clinics in dentistry, psychology, and psychotherapy make an important contribution to medical and psychosocial care. The challenge In order to be optimally equipped for the future, SFU has undertaken a comprehensive modernization of its central IT infrastructure to create a robust and highly available platform to support the diverse academic and administrative requirements of the institution. The solution By implementing Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell PowerVault storage arrays and the open-source hypervisor Proxmox VE, the university was able to optimize its operations and create a solid foundation for future growth. The new Linux server cluster consists of several Dell PowerEdge servers and has a redundant design for maximum reliability. The Dell PowerVault storage arrays are equipped with high-speed NVMe drives and connected to the server cluster with a bandwidth of 8x25 Gbit/s, ensuring rapid data transfer and optimal performance. A key feature of the new virtualization infrastructure is the ability to manage and administer the entire server landscape via a central web-based GUI. This enables the university's IT team to manage resources efficiently and optimize operations. The implementation The migration of approximately 100TB of data and virtual servers was successfully executed without compromising ongoing operations. The implementation of fail-safe server switches and configuration in high availability mode minimized potential downtime. To ensure continuous and reliable operation, Sigmund Freud University's systems are monitored around the clock. Alerts can be processed quickly to identify and rectify potential faults before they lead to problems. The modernization of our IT infrastructure was crucial for Sigmund Freud University in order to meet the increasing demands of research, teaching and administration. Mag. Dr. h.c. Heinz Laubreuter The results "The modernization of our IT infrastructure was crucial for Sigmund Freud University in order to meet the increasing demands of research, teaching and administration. Thanks to the excellent and professional cooperation with Siedl Networks and the implementation of advanced technologies, such as the open-source hypervisor Proxmox VE, we were able to create a high-performance and reliable platform that fully meets our requirements." Mag. Dr. h.c. Heinz Laubreuter, Chancellor of Sigmund Freud Private University "The consolidation and renewal of the central virtualization solution was planned and implemented by our Professional Services team within a three-month timeframe. In addition to the cluster services, the smooth migration of the virtual Linux and Windows servers and the option to easily expand the cluster in the future were important ‘must-haves’. To ensure maximum system availability in the future, the project also includes operational management and monitoring. The new open-source server solution will guarantee users digitally sovereign and reliable IT services." Robert Siedl, CMC, CEO of Siedl Networks GmbH About Sigmund Freud Private University Sigmund Freud Private University (SFU) was established in 2003 and has since become the largest private university in Austria, with approximately 5,000 students. It offers programs in psychotherapy science, psychology, medicine and law. SFU’s pioneering contributions to the field of psychotherapy science have been instrumental in establishing personality development as a third academic pillar alongside theory and practice across all study programs. Website: https://www.sfu.ac.at/en/ About Proxmox partner: Siedl Networks GmbH Siedl Networks is specialized in open-source technologies and Linux software solutions in the area of virtualization, IT infrastructure, email and groupware, software distribution and patch management, server clusters, and IT monitoring. The core competencies are the installation, migration, maintenance, and support of solutions from Univention, Kopano, SEP Sesam, Proxmox VE, and OPSI Server On Premises - in the data center or in the cloud. Website: https://www.siedl.net ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:58:17 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>EdgeUno achieving scalability and reliability across 25 locations</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/edgeuno-achieving-scalability-and-reliability-across-25-locations</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/edgeuno-achieving-scalability-and-reliability-across-25-locations</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ EdgeUno provides connectivity, cloud, and edge services in Latin America and in some regions in EMEA. As EdgeUno expands, a robust and scalable virtualization solution is imperative. With Proxmox VE, EdgeUno could achieve scalability and reliability across 25 global locations. Since 2019, EdgeUno has embarked on a transformative journey with Proxmox VE, leveraging its powerful virtualization capabilities to scale its operations. “Today, our large-scale deployment spans 25 global locations, utilizing both Proxmox VE version 7 and 8,” tells Fernando Castro, Director of Cloud and Platforms at EdgeUno. “Our dedication to providing top-notch services is underlined by our commitment to staying updated with the latest software offerings.” “We were looking for a platform that could support our ambitious project, edgeuno.cloud, as well as our internal systems, without compromising performance or reliability.” The Proxmox solution “Proxmox VE proved to be the ideal solution, providing a perfect balance of flexibility, scalability, and ease of use," says Fernando. Its implementation enabled EdgeUno to: Efficiently manage and provision over 2000 VPS worldwide. Utilizing both internal Ceph storage solutions, provided by Proxmox VE, and external Ceph with other open-source technologies. Seamlessly integrate with our internal systems through the robust Proxmox API. Impact and Results "The deployment of Proxmox VE has been a game-changer here at EdgeUno. Our key outcomes are: Enhanced Scalability: Proxmox VE helped us grow, enabling us to efficiently and rapidly expand our infrastructure across multiple locations. Reliable Performance: Our infrastructure, powered by Proxmox VE, reliably supports edgeuno.cloud and our internal systems, ensuring high availability and performance. Custom Integration: The ability to develop internal integrations using the Proxmox API has significantly enhanced our operational efficiency. Global Reach: With Proxmox VE, we globally manage a vast network of VPS to consistently and reliably deliver services to our customers." Conclusion “Proxmox VE has been instrumental in EdgeUno’s growth and success. Its scalability, reliability, and flexibility have enabled us to exceed our infrastructure goals. We wholeheartedly trust Proxmox VE and highly recommend it for VPS services, public, and private cloud environments. Our experience is a testament to the capability of Proxmox VE to empower modern businesses.” Fernando Castro Director of Cloud and Platforms ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 29 Mar 2024 13:50:03 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Textkernel uses Proxmox VE</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/textkernel-uses-proxmox-ve</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/textkernel-uses-proxmox-ve</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Textkernel is a leading AI-powered technology provider in the staffing, corporate HR and HR Technology industry. Their customers range from global staffing agencies to fortune 500 companies and leading HR technology providers. Textkernel solutions focus on recruitment and talent management automation and data enhancement to connect people and jobs better. “Back in 2018 we serviced all of our European customers out of a single datacenter rack”, says Max Vernimmen, Infrastructure technical lead at Textkernel. Application-level redundancy “We faced challenges with accelerating growth and increasing demands for higher uptimes. At that time, we relied on KVM with local storage and lacked application-level redundancy across most of our applications and databases. The absence of redundancy meant that a single server failure could lead to system disruptions, rendering our infrastructure fragile.” Proxmox Virtual Environment has become the backbone of our operations. Max Vernimmen, Textkernel “In my role as the technical lead for infrastructure at Textkernel, I guide the implementation process, remove roadblocks for fellow engineers, and intervene to address complexities." "Proxmox Virtual Environment has become an integral part of my daily work, helping to manage and maintain the Textkernel infrastructure.” High Availability and seamless expansions “The decision to explore Proxmox VE was prompted by the fragility of our infrastructure. The high-availability features proved instrumental, enabling us to vacate machines for planned maintenance or swiftly restart applications on alternative nodes in the event of server failures.” “This significantly enhanced our overall availability. Starting with version 5.2, Proxmox performed remarkably well, allowing us to expand our infrastructure across multiple racks in various datacenter locations." "Each of these expansions operated seamlessly on Proxmox VE, supported by dedicated Ceph servers for storage. Subsequent upgrades to newer Proxmox VE versions went smoothly, and to date, we have not encountered the need to reinstall any Proxmox servers during these updates.” “In essence, Proxmox Virtual Environment has become the backbone of our operations, facilitating the robust and scalable foundation upon which we run our business.” Max Vernimmen Infrastructure technical lead ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 23 Jan 2024 16:47:13 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>PhillyIX uses Proxmox solutions to optimize regional Internet traffic</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/phillyix</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/phillyix</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ PhillyIX is an Internet Exchange Point in Philadelphia where local schools, businesses, and content providers can share their network traffic. A three-node server cluster running Proxmox VE and backed up by Proxmox Backup Server, empowers the non-profit organization to deliver amazing connectivity to their members. The Philadelphia Internet Exchange Point (PhillyIX) is a non-profit organization in Philadelphia (USA) that provides a central location for schools, businesses, and content providers to come together and share network traffic with one another without having to pay for internet transit. This helps keep traffic local, which in turn improves the quality and availability of internet content for the city of Philadelphia and the surrounding areas. Three-node cluster running Proxmox solutions “Small internet exchanges like ours can sometimes thrive with a single network switch in a rack in some collocation building,” tells Tom Duff, President of the Board of Directors at PhillyIX. “But to add value to our members, we provide a wealth of free services such as traffic monitoring and statistics, DNS hosting, content caches, and multi-lateral peering via route servers. Additionally, our admin team has a multitude of internal tools that keep things running smoothly. All of these services and tools are hosted on a three-node cluster running Proxmox VE, and backed up by Proxmox Backup Server.” Disaster recovery a breeze “In the past, we had used VMware ESXi to an extent, but we found Proxmox VE to be easier to maintain, monitor, and customize to our needs. The Proxmox Backup Server makes disaster recovery a breeze, and gives our volunteer system admins the peace and security of knowing things are easily recoverable in the event of a failure.” Local traffic and internet availability “In addition to all that Proxmox VE is open-source software, and contributing to open-source projects is a passion of ours. The Proxmox subscription service is also quite a bit less expensive than comparable VMware solutions, and because our organization is entirely member-funded, prudent use of our funds is an essential part of being able to offer the best level of service to our members, at a cost well below industry standards.” Results “Proxmox VE empowers us to deliver amazing connectivity between local schools, businesses, and internet content providers; which helps us realize our mission of keeping traffic local, and improving the quality and availability of the internet in the City of Philadelphia.” Tom Duff President of the Board of Directors ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 21 Dec 2023 17:00:41 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Robotics club robo4you virtualizes with Proxmox VE</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/robo4you-en</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/robo4you-en</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ robo4you offers workshops in the field of robotics. The organization uses Proxmox Virtual Environment in a 10-node cluster and can therefore easily provide services for teaching. Students can learn virtual robotics through distance learning and the cluster is also used for machine learning and AI. robo4you is a nonprofit organization that helps promote science and technology in schools. The mission is to train and encourage students in the field of robotics, with an emphasis on preparing them for and engaging them in international competitions. In 2023, the Austrian team wins the International Botball® Tournament at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER) held in St. Augustin/Florida (USA). Robust IT infrastructure with 10-node cluster At the club's laboratory in Wiener Neustadt (Austria), a robust IT infrastructure has been established over the years. According to Alexander Lampalzer, board member and IT representative of robo4you, Proxmox Virtual Environment has been used as the preferred virtualization solution for a while now: "We currently operate a 10-node cluster using Proxmox Virtual Environment in our lab. Students can gain knowledge in robotics through the virtual environment. We also run workshops, training courses, machine learning, and AI applications on the cluster." Implementing Proxmox Virtual Environment has streamlined our IT system maintenance, making it faster and effortless. Alexander Lampalzer, robo4you Moodle and Gazebo „With Proxmox VE, we can efficiently provide basic teaching services. Deploying the Moodle learning platform and computationally intensive simulation environments, such as Gazebo – a well-known simulation tool for visualizing robots – no longer pose barriers to us." Cloning template VMs "We utilize Proxmox VE for our training VMs: As part of their course, students are assigned to configure their own Linux environment and in this use case, virtualization eliminates the need for physical hardware. By cloning a template VM, we can establish a foundation for this task efficiently." Engaging lessons thanks to effortless scaling "Moreover, the cluster functionality of Proxmox VE did boost our machine learning applications resource availability promptly. Scaling is effortless and quick, yielding faster results for our students, leading to more dynamic and engaging lessons." "The Covid-19 pandemic also has emphasized the value of online education. We successfully incorporated Proxmox VE into distance learning, allowing students to operate their robots from home. This approach enabled them to work on their robots remotely in a virtual environment, boosting their motivation and allowing for flexibility in terms of time and location. Homogeneous and simplified IT infrastructure The association has been around since 2010, and over time, robo4you has developed a highly varied IT infrastructure. However, the infrastructure required plenty of maintenance and was prone to errors. Currently, the club’s laboratory utilizes HP ProLiant Server Gen8 and Gen9, as well as the HPE BladeSystem Center as its hardware. The infrastructure is comprised mostly of donated or second-hand – but still enterprise-level – hardware. With the assistance of a virtualization technology, the aim was to standardize and simplify maintenance procedures. "With the Proxmox VE solution, we were particularly impressed by its open-source character and free availability," Alexander enthuses. "During the evaluation phase and the initial tests, we were able to draw on a lot of support from the community. We were actually so convinced by Proxmox VE straight away that we didn't even evaluate any other solutions." "Initially, we only used Proxmox VE on non-production systems, on which we set up VMs for training courses, for example. Only after a certain training period, once we were familiar enough with the software, did we also migrate our production systems." "The first steps with Proxmox VE were very quick and easy. Thanks to the support of the wonderful community and the helpful Proxmox team, we were able to resolve any issues we encountered. Using Proxmox Virtual Environment has streamlined our IT system maintenance, making it faster and effortless. In addition, the prompt provisioning of new resources for our training courses and workshops has been invaluable." Alexander Lampalzer Board member and IT officer About robo4you It all started with an optional subject at the Higher Technical Education Institute Wiener Neustadt, an engineering-focused college for higher vocational education. Over the years, robo4you has developed into an association with its own laboratory, sponsors, workshops and events, in which former members - now students or professionals - continue to be active alongside the pupils. The purpose of the association is to provide training in robotics and to prepare for and participate in international competitions. There are many successes to report: In addition to the robotics world championship title in 2023, over 700 people have won a total of 13 world championship titles and dozens of European championship titles since the association was founded in 2010. Additionally, robo4you offers workshops in the field of robotics and supports its graduates in participating in university competitions after graduation. The name robo4you is the brand for the nonprofit organization for the Promotion of Science and Technology in Schools (F-WuTS) and the club currently consists of 78 students, 5 teachers and more than 700 graduates. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 17 Nov 2023 17:38:01 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>HTL Leonding</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/htl-leonding-en</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/htl-leonding-en</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Since the academic year 2021/22, the HTL Leonding, an engineering-focused college, has been using Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) in order to teach network technology lessons in all classes and grades. Additionally, the platform is used to host applications that were developed in various students projects and diploma theses. The Austrian HTL Leonding offers its students disciplines such as informatics, media engineering, electronics/computer science, and medical engineering as well as a night school for informatics and system/media engineering. Modern education practice for computer networking Proxmox Virtual Environment was used at the HTL Leonding for a couple of years before it gained momentum in the academic year of 2021/22. During that year’s summer break, the teachers worked hard to put their instructional practices for building and setting up basic network services on a modern footing. Simultaneously, an advanced installation of Proxmox VE should be carried out based on the HTL’s initial installation. Additionally, the virtualization solution can also be used for applications developed in the context of school projects, making Proxmox VE an excellent add-on to the already existing LeoCloud. The Planning “In the development phase, the HTL Leonding analyzed and tested the individual features of Proxmox VE in detail,” explains Michael Wagner, teacher at HTL Leonding. “The simple and intuitive user interface turned out to be ideally suited for our school operations and for the students to make their first steps in a virtualization environment. The powerful network functions also made integration into the school network much easier and offered our students a wide range of options. At the end of the summer of 2021, we had set up and configured our server with the current version of Proxmox VE.” Challenging School Network The integration of Proxmox VE in the school network first appeared to be a challenge. In the end, the separation of the teaching network, the school internet, and the administration network was successfully realized with the help of both the IT administrator of the HTL Leonding and with the powerful network functionalities of Proxmox VE. M. Wagner, “Thanks to the flexibility of the virtualization platform the software allowed for an uncompromising implementation in terms of security and functionality.” Helpful Community and Proxmox Employees “During the entire setup process we also ran into problems and came up with questions which we couldn't answer or solve ourselves,” says Michael Wagner. “Luckily, we got lots of help from the Proxmox community forum and could solve all our issues. On top, the fact that Proxmox employees are also active in the forum added a lot of value to it.” Distance Learning and Hybrid Classes “At the beginning of the academic year 2021/22, we started the first lessons in the computer science department. Students quickly got a grip on the environment and were able to successfully implement the first exercises and practical tasks with Proxmox VE. We introduced the platform step-by-step, and thus, we were also able to eliminate existing rough edges in and around the system.” “During the Covid-19 pandemic we moved to distance learning and hybrid classes. The system revealed its full potential, as students could easily access it from home using OpenVPN. This enabled a seamless transition between the different teaching modes for us. It was a huge plus that students could manage their own virtual computing environment in Proxmox VE, a fact which contributed greatly to the success of the concept.” “In the course of the school year, we were able to expand the pool of tasks, exercises, and projects. We offered in-school training sessions, which were also well received. Other important success factors were the coordination meetings and intensive communication.” Completion and Use in Network Teaching Seven months after the start of the project at HTL Leonding the roll-out was completed and Proxmox VE is now used in network lessons in the first, second, and third years of computer science and media engineering, and also at the night school - a total of 18 classes and around 450 students. Michael Wagner “During the academic year, we were able to set up a high availability (HA) cluster consisting of three used servers. With this configuration we could kill two birds with one stone: we now have the necessary capacity to implement our planned teaching concept and have at the same time established fail-over.” Conclusion During the implementation phase, we had to overcome a few hurdles and invest lots of time. Without the great teamwork and mutual support, such a broad roll-out would not have been possible. Overall, the final outcome and benefits are much greater than our invested efforts. The student feedback on Proxmox VE has been very positive.” Michael Wagner Prof. Ing. at HTL Leonding About HTL Leonding A HTL (Higher Technical Education Institute) in Austria is an engineering-focused college for higher vocational education. HTLs are an important part of the Austrian vocational education and prepare people to work as technicians. They specialize in disciplines such as electrical engineering, informatics, information technology, mechanical engineering, and more. The HTL Leonding offers disciplines such as informatics, media engineering, electronics and computer science, medical engineering, as well as a night school for informatics and system/media engineering. Founded in 1984, the school currently has about 1100 students and 140 teachers of whom 12 teach networking, Cybersecurity and distributed systems. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 11 Oct 2022 16:07:47 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/odeon-theatre</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ The french Odéon-Théâtre wanted to simplify its server infrastructure and improve efficiency and scalability, while saving time on data center management. Using Proxmox VE, the theater built a robust cluster and established a scalable and reliable IT infrastructure to quickly adapt to changing needs and requirements. The Odéon-Théâtre de l'Europe, directed by Stéphane Braunschweig, is one of France's six national theaters. It was inaugurated by Marie-Antoinette in 1782 and, at that time, the Italian-style theater was the first Parisian monument fully dedicated to theatrical performances. The famous play “The Marriage of Figaro” by Pierre Beaumarchais premiered at the house in 1784. Located at Place de l’Odéon in Paris, the theater has currently a capacity for 800 visitors. Looking for simplification Today, the Odéon-Theatre uses the open-source virtualization solution Proxmox Virtual Environment for its IT infrastructure. Sylvain Cardine, CTO at Odéon, explains that all started years back when they needed to replace their old server infrastructure to improve efficiency and scalability. “We were primarily seeking to save time on managing licenses and on maintaining our data center. Our aim was to consolidate critical resources, gain flexibility in the choice of hardware and software, export backups, quickly create proof-of-concepts (PoC), and have a greater level of control over our virtual machines. We needed a simplification, that’s why we were looking for a virtualization solution.” The solution In 2022, Odéon’s data center consists of four servers: three of which are in a cluster located at the main site, and the fourth which is at a second site for backup. The main VMs operated are: a mail server; an RDS farm with Windows; a Debian VM for NetVault® Backup Solution and Smartdrive storage; Samba4 AD DNS, DAViCal, Voip Xivo, a reverse proxy, Jitsi, webmail, monitoring (promotheus) GLPI, Owncloud, Ansible, LDAP, Xibo; and other server applications where a SaaS cannot be used. “Stability is one of their most important gains,” says Sylvain Cardine. “The results of implementing Proxmox VE live up to our expectations and thanks to the constant evolution and development of the platform, we have replaced more and more physical servers with VMs with the goal to separate ourselves from all the hardware. We could drastically simplify our infrastructure.” Easy to back up and roll back “Additionally, we could solve the backup problem with the integrated backup tool for containers and VMs: It’s very easy to back up and roll back after a crash. We can export VMs from one site and import it quickly in another site with the vzdump command line tool.” A love story The love story between the Odéon-Theater and the Proxmox software dates back to 2008, when CTO Sylvain Cardinge first found out about the Proxmox virtualization solution in https://linuxfr.org, a popular French-speaking community news site mostly related to FLOSS. As the infrastructure in the theater is on-premises, a solution like the one from Proxmox was exactly what its IT department was looking for. At the beginning of their modernization journey, the IT department compared the free versions of VMware virtualization software, Xen (former Citrix versions), and Proxmox Virtual Environment (v0.9). “The latter was convincing because it was easy to install and set up, easy to create PoCs, and already very stable”, remembers Sylvain Cardine. “The stability and also the scalability are outstanding. Before going into production, I made a PoC with three basic PCs with Intel Core 2 Duo to test a cluster; I convinced my Linux colleague to test it and in the end we made the move. Proxmox VE enabled us from the beginning with its hybrid approach to use both containers and VMs. Later, we have migrated everything to VMs for more flexibility.” Impressive evolution meets growth expectation “The evolution of the virtualization platform in all these years is very impressive and met our growth expectations thanks to its scalability and stability. It became better and better since 2008! In the future, we're going to double our main Proxmox servers, and might be testing HA features.” “Thanks a lot for this incredible work to the Proxmox team! You deserve your success. Since 2008, it was a "coup de coeur" like we say in France. In English, this translates to love at first sight ;).” Sylvain Cardine CTO, Odéon Théâtre de l'Europe About Odéon Théâtre de l'Europe Founded: 1782 Capacity: 800 visitors ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jul 2022 14:13:06 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Data Space</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/data-space</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/data-space</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ "The Proxmox software allowed our datacenter for fast and stable development. As open-source enthusiasts, we are very pleased with its capabilities. Thanks to an active community and detailed documentation, our technicians can constantly expand their knowledge of virtualization and administration. The new cloud solutions that we implemented in 2020 were based entirely on the Proxmox VE solution." Radosław Szczygieł Marketing Manager, Data Space ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 11 Mar 2021 14:02:51 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Cyber-Complex Foundation</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/cyber-complex-foundation</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/cyber-complex-foundation</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Cyber-Complex Foundation works in the area of modern and innovative technologies carrying out research and experimental projects as well as demanding big data solutions. To do all this, they needed an advanced virtualization environment including containers along with the ability to dynamically manage the entire infrastructure. Proxmox VE combines computing resources “Proxmox VE has proven to be the ideal solution for our purposes and perfectly combines our centralized computing resources, of which we have many. We use Proxmox VE on a cluster built with 8 physical servers. This has greatly improved the management and automation of our relatively large virtualization and container environment.” “We also use our infrastructure for demanding big data solutions, and in this aspect Proxmox VE is also a great base for deployment.” - Lukasz Swierczewski Advanced analyses “Our main project at Cyber-Complex Foundation is called iThena and uses capabilities of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform. BOINC gives us the possibility to perform advanced analyses on computers of thousands of Internet users. Those analyses serve us to build models of the data flow in the global network.” “One of the results of the iThena project is, that we get information about the optimality of data transfer routes. Based on this data we can build, for example, rankings of the best ISP (Internet Service Provider) helping users to decide which offering will meet their expectations best. We perform advanced analytics of network traffic routing which can show errors in the global network BGP (routing protocol) configuration. These in return can point to threats like IP Hijacking, where attackers try to gain access to sensitive metadata.” Proxmox virtualization solution with many benefits “For us at Cyber-Complex, a foundation officially registered in Europe/Poland, Proxmox VE is the best server virtualization solution because it brings many benefits to us: Free and open-source solution including phenomenal low-cost and scalable support options; Easy and centralized management; Easy and reliable updates and upgrades; Fast and easy deployment of virtual machines, and especially Linux containers; Very easy backup/restore procedures.” “Prior to switching to Proxmox VE, we were using VMware ESXi hypervisor to some extent. However, we opted for Proxmox VE because among other things, we support open-source initiatives. Proxmox VE works phenomenally!” “We can fully recommend Proxmox VE as a great virtualization environment, that can handle even our most demanding requirements.” Lukasz Swierczewski Chairman of the Board, Co-Founder, Cyber-Complex Foundation (NPO) ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 01 Mar 2021 13:23:08 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>University of Macau scans emails with Proxmox Mail Gateway</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/university-of-macau</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/university-of-macau</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ At University of Macau around 50k emails are scanned per day on average with Proxmox Mail Gateway. It is used internally for scanning outbound emails: All outgoing emails are first routed to Proxmox Mail Gateway, where they are checked and either relayed or blocked. “Inbound scanning is currently done with another enterprise-grade mail gateway,” says Queenie Leong, assistant Information Technology technician at University Macau. “The greatest advantages of Proxmox Mail Gateway are its user-friendly interface and good user experience. We have a lot of reports and necessary statistics available and can quickly get an overview. The clustering functionality improves the mail gateway availability. What we also like is that the Mail Gateway has integrated anti-spam and anti-virus for enhanced email security. So, all in all, it is quick to set up and easy to manage." 3 VMs in a cluster “Implementing Proxmox Mail Gateway is very straight-forward as it provides an image that can be deployed as a VM. We installed three VMs as a cluster, each with 8 vCPUs and 8GB RAM.” “The University of Macau (UM) is an international, comprehensive university. Since its establishment in 1981, UM has been dedicated to providing a multifaceted education, through our educational model and residential college system, and in accordance with the university motto: Humanity, Integrity, Propriety, Wisdom and Sincerity.” From Postfix and PolicyD to Proxmox “Before starting to use Proxmox Mail Gateway, we had been using Postfix and Policyd as our internal email gateway. We found several introductory blog articles on deploying Proxmox Mail Gateway, and so we thought that it could also be applied in our University.” “At the beginning, we had some concerns about the requisites and the limit on the number of policies. We were not sure if it could fully replace our previous solution, which is based on PolicyD. We have a regular staff of about 1,600 and each morning the University sends a bulletin to the staff members and students—so email throughput needed to be tested.” “After some testing and checking, we found that the Mail Gateway platform fulfilled all our requirements and is also regularly updated. As it is an open-source project, we could fully test the platform and deployment before putting it into production. This finally convinced us to choose Proxmox Mail Gateway.” Great filtering rules “Our absolute favorite feature in Proxmox Mail Gateway is the rule-based mail filter, where you combine objects (sender, recipient, email, etc.) into a filtering rule. It is very easy to configure and very flexible.” Queenie Leong Assistant Information Technology Technician, University of Macau ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 20 Nov 2020 15:07:46 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>IGNUM s.r.o.</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/ignum-s-r-o</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/ignum-s-r-o</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ IGNUM chooses Proxmox Virtual Environment for their next generation of hosting services. As one of the most respected Czech domain registrars and server hosting providers, the company strives to provide services at the highest level, and therefore implemented Proxmox VE - as a stable element of the infrastructure. "IGNUM is a part of the Central-European WY Group, and we have chosen Proxmox VE as the platform for the next generation of our hosting services. Proxmox VE is a stable element of our infrastructure for providing services to our customers. We've chosen Proxmox VE as the platform for the next generation of our hosting services." One of the important features when choosing Proxmox was support of the Ceph storage. "We are already satisfied with Proxmox as an alternative to VMware and now we're about to replace the existing hosting cluster with Proxmox VE.” “IGNUM is a web hosting company that has been on the market for 19 years. It’s one of the most respected Czech domain registrars and server hosting providers. We currently manage over 160,000 domain names and serve more than 24,000 customers. The company was founded in 1998 and has been named IGNUM and the legal form of the limited liability company since 2000.” Tomáš Kostka Head of Procurement, IGNUM s.r.o. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2020 16:13:04 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Vying Technologies</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/vying-technologies</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/vying-technologies</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Vying Technologies is an Estonian based company providing multiple services to customers from anycast domain name services to custom websites based on NodeJS. “Proxmox Virtual Environment is the best way to simplify your IT infrastructure and/or provide cloud.” “Bonus: you can turn back in time and have your computer from yesterday. No more disruptions caused by ransomware! So, what's not to love about it? And for the desert: It's free and open-source.” “Since using Proxmox VE at Vying Technologies, the most important improvement I have seen is that I’m no longer tied up to a bare-metal server. I can move wherever I want. And I can move anyone to wherever I want.” “The services we offer to customers is mostly to virtualize their computers but also providing hosting using the Proxmox VE platform.” “Why we chose Proxmox VE? I got a great feedback from a friend who is server genie and also I saw that Misaka Network Inc. is using Proxmox. This was more than enough to start.” PS: All of us should buy a simple subscription just to honor the work of the Proxmox team. Alexandru Petru Vying Technologies ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 24 Aug 2020 15:54:49 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>ESTECO</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/esteco</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/esteco</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ ESTECO increases efficiency in software development with Proxmox VE ESTECO needed a complete development virtualization system for their test and research groups. After implementing Proxmox VE they can now quickly overview and manage their test machines and the deployment process is very fast. When developers request a new VM, the IT staff quickly instantiates them and provides access instantaneously. “Our company is highly specialized in numerical optimization and simulation data management and we develop optimization software like VOLTA and modeFRONTIER and support our customers. Each day, we have to instantiate numerous virtual machines either to check software functionalities, provide support to our customers, or to enable access to sandboxing VMs.” The biggest gain with Proxmox VE was that we could significantly reduce our working hours. Livio Tenze, head of IT at ESTECO Wasting to much time for VM management Livio Tenze is the head of IT department and an electronic engineer PhD in signal and image processing at ESTECO. Before implementing the Proxmox virtualization platform, the IT staff spent a lot of working hours just to create, configure, deploy, and backup all the virtual machines for the engineers from the development and test department in their company. “Now, the procedures are very fast,” says Livio, “and they enable our developers and engineers to quickly setup a VM to run tests checking the recently implemented software functionalities.” ESTECO is mainly involved in developing optimization software for desktop and enterprise installations. The company was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Trieste, Italy with offices in the USA and India. It has about 130 employees of which 80 are based in Italy and 50 at the other offices. With their products and services specialized in numerical optimization and simulation data management ESTECO helps their customers to design prototypes and future products. Over 300 international organizations have chosen ESTECO to consolidate specialized expertise, streamline teamwork, and boost product development across a wide spectrum of industrial sectors. Five Proxmox VE nodes running over 60 VMs and containers every day “Currently, we have five nodes with Proxmox VE,” says Livio Tenze, head of IT. “We have two AMD and three Intel nodes in a mixed cluster that runs about 60 VMs and containers every day. These nodes are connected to a data storage (ZFS storage: LUNs and filesystem are provided through iSCSI and NFS protocols to all of the nodes) where the VMs are stored, and we virtualize both Linux and Windows. Our backups are stored to specific local and remote infrastructures. Also, we already have another Hitachi SAN in production that we are going to connect with the Proxmox cluster.” “What makes Proxmox VE outstanding is the online storage migration feature which is very useful and powerful in many applications. Periodic backups, LDAP integration, and other features make Proxmox a reasonable solution for us.” “What pushed us to search for a virtualization solution was that we were looking for an efficient solution to manage all the machines for testing and development in a supervised environment. The main challenge was the fact that we needed some advanced technologies to simplify and speed up our every day work.“ “Choosing Proxmox VE significantly improved the efficiency of our company and sped up the development of our own software products,” says Livio T. “Moreover, virtual machines provide simple management, easy backup and restore procedure, fast re-installation and re-instantiation of servers.” Choosing Proxmox VE after testing Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and VMware “We have found Proxmox after many tests: Eucalyptus, OpenNebula, and VMware. Then we installed and tested the Proxmox VE solution which was introduced to us by our colleagues from SymTech IT. As Proxmox partner, they have a lot of expertise with Proxmox VE themselves and could help us a lot. We finally choose Proxmox VE because it’s so easy to manage and it’s a robust solution for a virtualization environment.” “Now, virtualization provides high flexibility to all of our developers and engineers during development and testing. We currently instantiate many VMs to run a lot of tests to check new software functionalities, to support our customers, or to give access to a sandbox VM to test a new product. This is the main use we do with virtualization.” “As we exploit many open-source solutions for development at ESTECO, we had no concerns about the open-source solution at all. Moreover, we found that Proxmox VE contains many features not available in other environments. Under many aspects, Proxmox VE is easier to manage and use than other solutions. For instance, the web interface provides almost everything you need to manage VMs. We can also minimize the use of the command line, which makes work faster. However, in some operations the command line is still very powerful. For us, the combination is just a perfect choice.” Implementation “Implementing Proxmox VE was fast and easy. We found some spare nodes for testing the virtualization system and then we installed Proxmox on them. We tested both, hardware virtualization (KVM) and paravirtualization (OpenVZ and LXC). It was easy to setup Proxmox VE and without any problems. We found useful help and user guides provided by the Proxmox wiki and website. For some advanced customization we also got a little help from our colleagues at SymTech IT.” Result: Reducing work time and improving performance The outcome of implementing Proxmox VE within ESTECO has been successful and the company now has a complete development virtualization system for testing and research groups. “After implementing Proxmox VE we can now easily overview and manage the test machines, and the deployment process is very fast. When our developers request a new VM, we quickly instantiate them and they can access and use it instantaneously. Furthermore, with VM templates we have a very efficient way when many VMs, especially with the same configuration, need to be instantiated.” “We also could improve performance after implementing Proxmox VE. Overall, we significantly reduced our work time – creation, configuration, deployment, backup procedures are now really fast for us.” “The most important benefit we could achieve is that Proxmox VE speeds up our core work and helps us with its ease of management.” Livio Tenze Electronic Engineer PhD in signal and image processing, head of IT department, ESTECO About ESTECO ESTECO is an independent software provider, highly specialized in numerical optimization and simulation data management with a sound scientific foundation and a flexible approach to customer needs. Over 300 international organizations have chosen ESTECO to consolidate specialized expertise, streamline teamwork and boost product development across a wide spectrum of industrial sectors. ESTECO was founded in 1999 and is headquartered in Trieste, Italy with offices in the USA and India. It has about 130 employees of which 80 are based in Italy and 50 at the other offices. About Proxmox partner: SymTech IT SymTech IT is a professional IT systems and solutions provider with a focus on cloud services and business continuity. Since 20 years SymTech has been dealing with IT systems and solutions, with the aim to support and follow its customers along the path of information technology and to provide them with competent and effective solutions and support. The company is specialized in ensuring the security of company data and ensuring the availability of services. SymTech is based in Trieste, Italy and a Proxmox reseller and training partner. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2020 13:10:01 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Egmont Højskolen</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/egmont-hojskolen</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/egmont-hojskolen</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Egmont Højskolen is an inclusive folk high school in Denmark with about 120 employees and 220 students. To manage multiple servers for different purposes and to provide service for IT equipment like PCs, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones to its staff and students, the school uses Proxmox VE to simplify the IT infrastructure. Today, Proxmox VE is the virtualization solution of choice for Egmont Højskolen and the team manages a production cluster with eight Proxmox VE hosts providing live migration, a NFS-based shared-storage system, and clustering. Additionally, the school has a test cluster with four hosts functioning as their playground for testing ‘stuff’. Virtualization to cope with increasing complexity of IT “At the school we have to manage a lot of IT equipment, including many stationary computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. And we run quite a lot of servers for different purposes. One of our main challenges is to keep the servers up and running all the time. And also to move everything from a backup to a new physical machine if something breaks. Today we use Proxmox Virtual Environment.” Egmont Højskolen is a danish folk high school, which is a special kind of boarding school for pupils over the age of 18. Students typically spend six months at the school engaging in all kinds of subjects from philosophy, arts, sports, and many others. “One special thing about our school is that some of our students have a disability in one way or the other,” says Hans Otto Lunde, teacher and system administrator at Egmont. “But most of them have none, and the big idea is to live inclusion and to teach both groups, that we can perfectly live together - despite being different. This is our most important value: Respect for and solidarity with others. We call it a kind of ‘life-education’. Our goal is to prepare the students for their studies and jobs. But mainly, we hope that the students will leave us being wiser and happier, than they were before coming to Egmont Højskolen.” From XenServer to Proxmox VE “Around 2015, we started looking into virtualization with the goal to stop the ever increasing complexity in our IT department. We evaluated XenServer and VMware, and I also had an eye on Proxmox VE. Our main limitation was the budget. Like many other schools, we can't just go and buy the newest and fanciest hardware.” “In the end we decided to go with XenServer. But then, about two years ago, we started to have hardware problems with the blade server system running XenServer. We had to move everything onto a temporary system, the "quick & dirty" way, and immediately started to re-evaluate different virtualization solutions.” Building our own system “Finally, we decided to build our own system. On Ebay, we bought three blade systems, each of them with four physical servers with two Xeon CPUs each. We also invested in a NAS storage system with a lot of hard disk space and redundancy - a highly available system with two NAS servers mirroring each other. And we bought two 10 GB/s switches that are tied together for redundancy and connect the blade servers to the storage system.“ Proxmox VE with interface for live migration and clustering “Me and my colleague really like open-source software. Looking again at Proxmox VE it was clear, that it had evolved massively, since I had last tested it. It’s VERY stable, and it gives us the possibility to live migrate servers from one Proxmox VE host to another. Additionally, it has a really nice interface, which you can access from any [!] member host of the cluster.” “Sometimes a host has a kernel update and needs to be restarted. But with Proxmox VE we can theoretically keep all the VMs running forever – you just migrate the VMs away from the hosts that needs the update, and then back again.” Implementation: Proxmox VE cluster setup at Egmont Currently, Egmont school has ended up with a traditional Proxmox VE setup, and they run the VM's off a NFS-based shared-storage system. In total they have eight hosts in a production cluster and four hosts in a test cluster, the latter being the playground to try out "stuff".… . “Proxmox is a modern company and their software is open-source licensed with the AGPL v3, so anyone can download it and use it for free. They do this by utilizing other free and open-source software like the Linux-kernel with KVM, Corosync, Ceph, and other projects. And they tie all these technologies together in an integrated "package", so we don't have to do that. A very nice package, indeed.” Supporting the support team “The Proxmox team makes money by providing expertise and support to customers like us. And indeed, they are very good at it. Why we decided to buy a subscription, although we could download the software for free? We tried it out, and it was so convincing, that we kept it. It is clear to us, that all the software development, the Proxmox team does, needs some financial backing.” “This is why we subscribed to the Proxmox support service that gives us the possibility to get technical support from them whenever we need it. Although we are quite tech-savy guys at Egmont Højskolen, we might need support one day…you never know. And the Proxmox guys are certainly more ‘techy’ than us with regards to Proxmox VE…” “More power to them.” Hans Otto Lunde Højskolelærer/Systemadministrator, Egmont Højskolen About Egmont Højskolen Founded: 1956 Employees: 120 ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2020 17:31:13 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Kimenz</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/kimenz-equipamentos</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/kimenz-equipamentos</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Kimenz Equipamentos Eireli is a team of professionals specializing in clinical engineering, and technical assistance for hospital and dental care with over 35 years of experience in repair, calibration of medical equipment, as well as laboratory and dental equipment. “By using Proxmox VE with old hardware, we are able to provide an enterprise-grade high availability database to all public health facilities in Brazil," explains Marcos Méndez from Kimenz Equipamentos. "We provide reliable and affordable services for the management and development of clinical engineering solutions for hardware health monitoring and analyzing medical assets and facilities.” “Kimenz offers technical assistance services to the Brazilian state. Basically, we repair and maintain medical, hospital, laboratory, and dental equipment. In Brazil, 76% of health care services are provided through government agencies, like for example the state government of São Paulo. They have a contract for managing clinical engineering and operate the emergency room equipment and health facilities. More than 2000 of those units are served by Kimenz Equipamentos. Our clients have real-time monitoring of the calls for repair and maintenance of their essential equipment for health and life maintenance.” “In the beginning, we mainly wanted to re-use old but very reliable hardware and build a structure that had a low initial cost but could later scale quickly. Since I have been working with Proxmox VE for the last three years, I’ve decided to implement a data center infrastructure. "Now we have setup a data center that is highly reliable, has no downtime, and never stops - like public health is ought not to ever stop.” “Our infrastructure is constantly evolving and more and more we are developing integrations for IoT infrastructure and other technologies that are directly integrated with Proxmox managed machines.” “It is a pleasure to be able to help the Proxmox community and above all to know that Kimenz together with a partner like Proxmox has a real impact on the health of the Brazilian citizens. For us such a system is only possible thanks to open source technologies. Congratulations to all the Proxmox members and community. It’s a pleasure to know how important we are together.” Marcos Méndez IT departement, Kimenz Equipamentos Eireli ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:50:39 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>logi.cals</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/logi-cals</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/logi-cals</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ To centralize its server infrastructure grown over the years, logi.cals GmbH chooses open-source technologies for their high level data center. To obtain a reliable server environment, the company migrates its mix of hypervisors, including Citrix Xen, KVM, and bare-metal servers to a centralized environment with Proxmox VE. At logi.cals GmbH engineers have been programming software tools and platforms for industrial automation since 1987. From microprocessors to multi-core IPC, scalable and portable run-time systems have been programmed. Over 30,000 engineers worldwide use the software from logi.cals to automate complex systems such as hydroelectric power plants and steel mills, as well as buildings, ships, buses, machines and many more. For the company's own IT infrastructure, it was time to take new paths. The existing server landscape was aging and needed an upgrade. A mixture of hypervisors (Citrix XEN, KVM), bare-metal servers, and distributed storage was in use. A major goal was to replace the existing server landscape with modern, centralized, and flexible server and storage systems. Requirements specification including "must-have" requirements Building a private cloud infrastructure in the own data center High availability for the critical and most important systems Resource adaptation must be flexible enough Easily scalable and expandable Comprehensive disaster recovery solution Easy monitoring of all physical and virtual servers, and the storage Open-source system without “vendor lock-in” for individual adjustments Easy administration and maintenance, including Enterprise support Predictable costs within the budget With all these requirements logi.cals engaged Siedl Networks - an open-source system integrator and Proxmox partner from Krems (Austria) - to develop and implement a solution for their need. The solution offered by Siedl Networks included two new Fujitsu RX2510 servers with a central Fujitsu Eternus DX 100 storage. The Eternus DX100 was designed to be completely redundant, with the ability to exchange all components online in case of a failure. To increase performance, additional SSD cache disks were installed into the Eternus. The two servers were connected directly to the Eternus storage via 4x 10GBit iSCSI, and to the local network via a 10GBit Ethernet. Proxmox VE was installed as the hypervisor on both servers. The virtual machines from the old Citrix Xen environment were migrated to the new Proxmox environment in a step-by-step process. Also the physical servers were gradually moved to Proxmox VE. Today, about 40 virtual servers with more than 10 TB of storage capacity are operated on the company's virtualization platform. To further improve system availability, the virtual servers are backed up to external storage. “With the Proxmox VE solution implemented by Siedl Networks, our data center is flexible and can be easily adapted to the dynamic requirements of our server infrastructure. The switch was carried out within the agreed time frame, and the users barely noticed the few down-times. The reliability of our new server environment makes me happy every day,” says Marcus Mittermayr, Director of Software at logi.cals. The project was implemented by the Professional Service Team of Siedl Networks within 4 months with only short maintenance windows, and has been running for more than a year now without any troubles. In order to keep the servers secure and up-to-date, Siedl Networks is taking care of the ongoing maintenance and support. “With Proxmox Server Solutions, we have found an Austrian software developer who perfectly meets our need for a flexible, open-source, and reliable virtualization platform with enterprise support at a reasonable price—furthermore with support in German language, and in the same time zone,” Robert Siedl CEO, Siedl Networks About logi.cals GmbH The logi.cals GmbH with locations in Austria and Germany have been programming software tools and platforms for industrial automation since 1987. Our main solutions are the IEC 61131-3 programming system of the logi.CAD series and the highly portable runtime system logi.RTS, which is scalable from the microcontroller level to multi-core IPCs. Functional control system specifications are covered by the documentation tool logi.DOC. More than 30,000 engineers worldwide are using logi.cals software to automate complex systems such as hydroelectric power plants and steel mills, as well as buildings, ships, buses, machines and much more. logi.cals helps users create, test and manage efficient, high-quality solutions. Website: https://www.neuron-automation.eu About Proxmox partner: Siedl Networks GmbH Siedl Networks is specialized in open-source technologies and Linux software solutions in the area of virtualization, IT infrastructure, email and groupware, software distribution and patch management, server clusters, and IT monitoring. The core competencies are the installation, migration, maintenance, and support of solutions from Univention, Kopano, SEP Sesam, Proxmox VE, and OPSI Server On Premises - in the data center or in the cloud. Website: https://www.siedl.net ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2019 10:30:23 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>StorageBase</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/storagebase</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/storagebase</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ As a professional web service provider, StorageBase offers its customers in conjunction with the business data center operator First Colo GmbH powerful KVM vServers based on Proxmox VE. The company has received several awards in the area of availability and its core competencies are in monitoring, scalability and support. StorageBase is strengthening its market position in the hosting business in the German-speaking area and is working on constantly improving its day-to-day business. Solution-oriented approach with Proxmox VE As a timely and highly specialised IT service provider with the claim to enhance its own services continuously, StorageBase sees itself constantly challenged in the fast moving IT market. Today’s customers, especially those in the storage business, are demanding state-of-the-art server environments, as well as the right certifications. Although, StorageBase was able to create the optimum conditions for efficient daily operations right from the start, the managers of StorageBase had increasingly growing demands of themselves in order to meet the individual needs of their customers even better. “At this point, Proxmox VE came into play,” says Julian Weiler, technical director at StorageBase. “As an open-source virtualization solution Proxmox VE combines KVM and container-based virtualization on a single platform, and manages all relevant functions through the integrated, centralized management interface, providing great flexibility. Especially Linux containers are considered a strong alternative to fully virtualized VMs. Existing resources are optimally exploited on the basis of many professional functions, which greatly reduces operating costs.” “In search of the right solution, we discovered the offering of the First Colo data center at the same time as Proxmox VE. First Colo is a Proxmox hosting partner and was able to provide us with a high-performance Proxmox cluster connected to the Ceph Storage. This way we could benefit from strong cost advantages over other providers of equivalent products”, says Julian Weiler. "In addition, as an open source solution Proxmox VE is highly reliable while also providing us with the highest level of flexibility by combining KVM and Linux containers on a single platform. Last but not least, the virtualized environment is very powerful and truly convincing due to its high availability." Full service for the Ceph Storage “We also chose First Colo because it allows us to provide our customers with a very performant and highly secure environment by using Ceph storage. In addition, the communication was excellent from the start, and the provided service was extremely professional at all times. Another deciding factor was the offered lease-purchase option for the servers we ordered. This gave us a great advantage in terms of cost optimization, as we were able to focus on our core business immediately and without considerable investment, while at the same time providing our customers with the best possible hardware. In addition, First Colo itself carries out all the maintenance tasks on Ceph. With this service, they made a critical part of our work easier from the very start.” Conclusion “We will continue to expand our service offering in the future in order to be able to provide a sustainable and steadily growing business environment to our customers. StorageBase continues its solution-oriented and reliable work. Thus, our customers can be confident that they will get the best possible starting position choosing StorageBase as their web service provider.” Julian Weiler CTO, StorageBase About StorageBase StorageBase is a professional web service provider. Next to crucial infrastructures for operations, the company offers its customers highly performant products in the areas of web, game and voice server hosting ever since April of 2009. StorageBase prefers resource-efficient Eco data centers. With flexible service bundles, attractive pricing, and good support, StorageBase eases the work for its hosting customers. https://storage-base.de About Proxmox Partner: First Colo GmbH First Colo is a professional business data center operator with a focus on high availability, secure IT technology and services in the area of IT outsourcing, managed hosting, DDoS protection and network security. First Colo offers a complete Proxmox VE image that lets you start the installation and configuration of your virtual machines immediately. More at https://www.first-colo.net/virtualisierung ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jan 2019 15:20:48 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>nic.at</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/nic-at</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/nic-at</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ To manage their hardware and also enable VM migration between two locations which are 300km apart, the Austrain domain registry nic.at opts for the ZFS-based Proxmox VE storage replication. nic.at GmbH is the official registry for all domains ending in .at, and for the extensions co.at and or.at. The company has its offices in Vienna and Salzburg and both sites operate IT services to achieve geographic independence. "For a new project, we were looking for a virtualization solution that could manage our hardware at both locations in a single cluster, and also enable VM migration between Vienna and Salzburg. Most virtualization solutions move the migration issue to shared storage. However, there are hardly any affordable storage solutions if the redundant storage sites are 300 km (186 miles) apart. It was also important for us to have a solution where you can detect software errors yourself and fix them if necessary. That's why we preferred an open-source solution." With the ZFS-based Proxmox VE storage replication framework, we have found a solution that meets our needs. Replication is configurable per VM and is fast, stable and flexible. In total, we now operate 3 Proxmox VE clusters, each of which having one node in Vienna and Salzburg. The sites are redundantly connected via the nic.at backbone with 1Gbit, where the VMs communicate via IPsec encrypted GRE tunnels. "Various questions at the beginning of our project were answered quickly and competently in the forum and on the mailing lists--even without having a subscription. Nevertheless, we have decided to invest in commercial subscriptions to support the further development of Proxmox VE." "After these first positive impressions with Proxmox VE we are already planning further applications." Klaus Darilion Head of Operations, nic.at ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Aug 2018 16:52:20 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Eomnia</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/eomnia</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/eomnia</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ The world’s first low-power data center running fully on renewables is built with a Proxmox VE cluster and Ceph storage, and is operated at a zero-emission research station on Antarctica. It is the world’s “coolest” data center. Antarctica is the Earth’s southernmost, coldest, driest, and windiest continent. No humans ever populated Antarctica except for a couple of thousand scientists living nowadays semi-permanently on scientific research stations, and a few former whaling settlements. For the last ten years the Belgian state and the International Polar Foundation have been operating one of the new batch of research stations built during the International Polar Year 2007-2009, called Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. The First Zero-Emission Polar Research Station Princess Elisabeth station is special in two ways: First, as Antarctica is difficult to reach most research stations are located at the coast for easier access. Only a few are situated a little farther inland, Princess Elisabeth being one of them. The station is in East Antarctica at 220km from the coast. The closest neighbors are a Russian station at 431 km distance, and a Japanese station 648 km away. Princess Elisabeth station opens up a wide new area for polar research in an incredible pristine environment. Secondly, the station is special because it is the world's first zero-emissions research station in Antarctica running fully on renewable and carbon-neutral energy and operating an energy efficient data center. “Coolest” Proxmox data center completely powered by wind and sun Thomas Petracca, IT architect at Eomnia, is the technology adviser for the International Polar Foundation. He is responsible for implementing and maintaining the station’s IT infrastructure. The antarctic data center is built with Proxmox VE and provides state-of-the-art storage and data recovery for scientific instruments, communications, and station monitoring. To run a research station and a data center inland of Antarctica is a challenge. Meteorological conditions are harsh on top of the Utsteinen Ridge where the futuristic looking passive building of Princess Elisabeth station is anchored to the granite. Temperatures range between -50°C to -5°C, the strong katabatic winds rush down the elevated slopes of the ice sheets. Constant darkness changes with months of constant sunlight. During the austral summer season there is 24 hours of daylight during 100 days out of 120 comprising the season. The hostile conditions at Princess Elisabeth were turned to advantage: Almost all of the station is covered with photovoltaic and thermal solar panels producing electricity and hot water when the sun is shining. They consist of redundant solar clusters of 15 Kw and 38 Kw. Nine wind turbines, 6 Kw each, turn the strong winds into electricity all year round. In total, the station produces an energy excess which can be stored in a battery room on four interconnected battery clusters of 8000 Ah capacity. For security and backup two generators are on site The green energy sources create all the electricity needed to operate the entire station including the data center. Running fully on renewables makes Princess Elisabeth Antarctica the first of its kind. Modernizing the inefficient, power-intense data center Between 25-40 scientist live on the station doing field research during 4 months of the year. The scientific field studies they conduct are data and resource intensive and include projects such as ice mass measurements, meteorological monitoring, or exploration of the microbial diversity,...to mention only a few. The unique location away from the continental edge provides access to a wide variety of environments for study which help for example to understand the impact of humans on climate change. The initial IT architecture on the station consisting of two standalone, reliable industrial PCs was planned and implemented by Thomas from Eomnia more than ten years ago. They were mainly used for the management of the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Thomas maintained the IT infrastructure during the on-site season in summer, and via remote satellite connection in winter. However, energy efficient technology evolved and in 2017 Eomnia advised on strategy and the roll-out of a network and server upgrade to reduce energy consumption and adapt to latest technologies. Fail-over, redundancy, and 2000 Watt savings with a Proxmox VE and Ceph cluster Most scientific instruments as well as the station’s control system, a micro smart grid, now run virtualized on the Proxmox VE cluster. The multi-node server cluster is built on customized chassis based on Supermicro equipment and Proxmox VE software. The main focus of the system is on energy efficiency, redundancy and scalability. “We provided a new customized open-source virtualization and storage environment based on Proxmox VE architecture integrating software-defined storage solution Ceph. This way we could not only save over 2000 Watt at the research station but finally provide fail-over and redundancy for the scientific and station systems.” Thomas Petracca After perfecting this unique combination Thomas could gain a powerful but low-energy consuming virtualization environment. Using Ceph storage and combining it with SaaS and IaaS cloud services Eomnia is now able to provide on-demand storage and virtual machines for the research station. Thanks to a reliable satellite link provided by the company SES (based in Luxembourg), this is possible on both, local and cloud architecture. “We can control, store, and backup data directly or in the cloud via remote control. Compared to other commercial products, which mostly rely on separate and dedicated hardware for SAN, NAS, and hypervisor, the key combination of our selected Supermicro equipment and Proxmox architecture resulted in a very competitive and efficient setup for the research station.” Micro Smart Grid System prioritizing energy consumption Princess Elisabeth Station is managed by a micro smart grid system. The micro smart grid is a small-scale version of an electrical grid controlling the generation, distribution, and regulation of the electricity flow. All of the station’s systems are integrated and piloted by a programmable logic controller (PLC), the “brain” of the station, ensuring optimal and secure working and living conditions inside the station. The smart grid is based on the principle of energy prioritization, and it functions like a smart organism. If energy is low, the smart grid technology shuts down the various systems according to their energy levels and priority. Intensive computing processes will for example only take place in case there is enough or a surplus of energy. Security and life support systems will be the last to be switched off. During eight months of winter, when the station is not occupied, staff controls the smart grid remotely via satellite. “Proxmox VE is the core of the system during off-season,” explains Thomas. “The Proxmox VE HA cluster controls our automation. If we lose it, we’d lose control of our scientific instruments or of the data repatriation. It is really business critical. There are some low-power redundancy solutions, but just for keep-alive purposes.” Real-time data repatriation via satellite ground station Princess Elisabeth Station is permanently linked to Belgium via a satellite antenna which was built by SES. This is a crucial feature of the station and will allow scientists to send scientific data to their laboratories worldwide in real-time. The satellite link allows for efficient communication with remote members of the team and enables high-speed transfer of data collected in the field. Beyond the scientific added value of the satellite link-up with the station, the main advantage is the ability to remotely operate the station, thus ensuring best efficiency for the micro smart grid's energy management. Proxmox servers heating the antarctic station Providing storage and computing power on exceptional locations like Antarctica really offers some special opportunities and challenges. It might seem intuitive to use the cold antarctic air to cool the systems. But in fact the preferred solution at Princess Elisabeth polar station is to distribute the heat from the servers into heating the research and living modules of the station. “As a result we could significantly reduce the power consumption for heating these areas,” Thomas says. “This results in an additional reduction of the stations total energy consumption freeing resources. The significant power reduction we achieved in total with Proxmox VE and Ceph technologies allowed us to re-align the station’s power budget.” With the additional budget available, the International Polar Foundation is now investing in new innovative projects. With the successful implementation of open-source Proxmox VE virtualization platform with integrated Ceph storage at Princess Elisabeth research station, Eomnia and the IPF could modernize the antarctic data center, increase energy efficiency and sufficiency, and can now re-align the available budget to invest in new developments. Thomas Petracca IT architect, Eomnia About Eomnia Eomnia's core business is data center & wireless deployments. The latest developments in software-defined networking (SDN) technique gave us the opportunity to provide data center technologies to the most demanding & remote places. Our IAAS & SAAS knowledge combined with our in depth knowledge in wireless technologies (VSAT, LTE, LORA, point-to-point, SD WAN ...) offers us a unique advantages to provide technologies such as machine learning, neural networks, monitoring, etc ... to high availability & remote environments. More at http://www.eomnia.be About International Polar Foundation The Brussels-based International Polar Foundation (IPF) was founded by Belgian engineer, mountain guide and polar explorer Alain Hubert with Prof. Hugo Decleir and Prof. André Berger in 2002 to highlight the role of polar science in planning for the future. The innovative and sustainable "Zero-Emission" Princess Elisabeth research station is a high-profile project initiated by the IPF and its partners. It is jointly run by the Belgian State and the IPF. More at http://www.polarfoundation.org/ ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jan 2018 16:46:08 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>MassiveGRID</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/massivegrid</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/massivegrid</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ MassiveGRID is a worldwide high-end service provider, with over 14 years of hands-on experience in the fields of high availability service hosting, turn-key service solutions, and development. Through Proxmox Virtual Environment, the company could ease hardware maintenance and upgrading, which helps them avoid down-time on any of their customers services. “With our strategy for unsurpassed quality and 100% customer satisfaction, we differentiate ourselves from competition”, says Vasileios Stoidis, CEO at MassiveGRID. “Proxmox VE is our preferred option for server virtualization management software, especially since security, efficiency, and stability are our top priorities. We thrive for excellence, and are committed to providing a leading class service, mainly focusing on open-source architecture to avoid vendor lock-in and to increase flexibility & freedom of choice.” “Several years ago, we decided to use Proxmox VE since it supported Ceph storage. And over time our decision proved right. Now, years later we have expanded to multiple infrastructures, both shared and private in four continents, supporting all kinds of different OS and services." Vasileios Stoidis More specifically, through Proxmox VE, hardware maintenance and upgrade is easy and straightforward with effortless migration, avoiding down-time on any of our customers services.” “The multi-master clustering functionality ensures that all our HA infrastructures remain manageable at all times. Network configuration allows us both public or private networking in a secure and isolated environment. Dedicated resources from our clients are always isolated and available using Proxmox VE limitation, especially CPU units and disk throttle.” “Wrapping-up, we consider Proxmox a valuable partner, and we envisage a long and prosperous relationship with them.” Vasileios Stoidis CEO, MassiveGRID ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jul 2017 15:53:47 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Crate.io</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/crate-io</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/crate-io</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ “Proxmox VE gives us the tools to manage our dynamic infrastructure easily. We can handle multi tenancy PoC infrastructures as well as our sophisticated software testing environment like a breeze!" Jodok Batlogg Founder & CTO, Crate.io About Crate.io Crate.io is the developer of CrateDB, an open source distributed database offering the scalability and performance of NoSQL with the power and ease of standard SQL. Designed specifically to support IoT and machine data applications, Crate is optimized for containerized environments. Crate.io is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Berlin, Germany and Dornbirn, Austria. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 14 Jun 2017 13:49:20 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Shopento</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/shopento-2</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/shopento-2</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ A Proxmox VE cluster with Ceph storage offers FluidWEB the perfect highly available unit for "Shopento". With the "Shopento" brand, FluidWEB offers e-commerce and cloud hosting /IaaS services for Magento. The company runs Proxmox VE based virtual datacenters at various independent locations in Germany. „Our Proxmox VE clusters consist of several Dell PowerEdge servers and are connected to the storage network with 10Gbit cards. Our cluster storage runs on Ceph which helps us to gain extremly great performance. The clusters are completely redundant; hardware failovers of a node are no problem because the gateways will be moved with HA directly on another node. Our internal cluster-wide networking allows us to provide an individual and scalable infrastructur as a service (IaaS) concept to our customers." „We prefer the LXC container technology with Proxmox VE because containers deliver the best performance for our use. By using LXC we can host our e-commerce applications without any headaches." Daniel Jotzo CEO, FluidWEB GmbH About FluidWEB FluidWEB is an internet agency based in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Since 2003 the company is specialized on e-commerce, development, and cloud hosting/IaaS. Shopento is a brand of Fluidweb and offers professional and highly available Magento 1 and 2 e-commerce cloud infrastructures at www.shopento.de. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2017 16:49:29 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Native Instruments</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/native-instruments</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/native-instruments</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Native Instruments builds a highly robust and reliable open-source infrastructure for its 450+ employees—at a cost far less than commercial solutions. Native Instruments is a leading manufacturer of software and hardware for computer-based audio production and DJing. The company's mission is to develop innovative, fully-integrated solutions for all musical styles and professions. The resulting products regularly push technological boundaries and open up new creative horizons for professionals and amateurs alike. Native Instruments sees itself as a part of a vibrant international music scene, and its 450+ employees are in constant communication with artists whose feedback is integrated into the conception and continuous improvement of its products. Daniel Wedewardt, director of IT at Native Instruments is responsible since 10 years for all the company’s operational IT infrastructure at the Berlin headquarter and all international offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Paris, and Shenzhen. Not only does he oversee all the employee’s workplaces - each including a phone, a monitor and a PC workstation - but also is he responsible for the entire network, the server rooms, and the data center. Currently, Wedewardt is responsible for a team of 13 employees. Half of the team, all being Linux generalists, are responsible for the entire hardware, virtualization, high availability, data bases, PBX, IT security, network, and the data centers. Efficient resource utilization, high availability and security with virtualization Virtualization started to become important at Native Instruments more than 10 years ago. At that time it was already clear that loads of electricity and space would have to be wasted until fulfilling the company's high requirements for a diverse system and service landscape with dedicated hardware. To prevent this, and with regard to efficient resource utilization combined with high availability and security, it was clear at an early stage that the company had to virtualize their infrastructure. Building a scalable, robust and reliable infrastructure with Proxmox VE “In search of the right solution we have been evaluating various platforms for the past ten years,” said Daniel Wedewardt. “As open source enthusiasts with a tight budget we first tried vServer. Later on we started working with VMware ESX and Parallels. Since 2011, however, we are using Proxmox VE. The reason why we chose Proxmox was that a new colleague joining us at that time presented the solution to us and I remember the whole team being enthusiastic immediately. PVE uses standardized technologies, is well maintained, and open source. Important points for the Linux and open source enthusiasts among us.” “We first implemented a two node Proxmox VE cluster, then established a DRBD-master-master sync between the two nodes, and finally installed our first VMs for testing. After running the setup for some time and after testing plenty of possible failover scenarios we felt confident enough to move production VMs to our cluster. Step by step we added additional cluster nodes and finally rolled out the setup to our other offices.” “From the beginning on we really loved the user interface of Proxmox VE as well as the live migration feature. Thanks to those features we could ensure an almost uninterrupted operation—but at a fraction of the cost of its commercial counterparts.” Daniel Wedewardt High-end features on commodity hardware “Nothing has changed fundamentally in our setup since then. Today we mainly run our initial system setup without fundamental changes, we simply scaled out. We have much more cluster nodes now and of course also the hosted VMs increased accordingly. Despite all the growth the core setup hasn’t changed much. In terms of hardware we only use commodity hardware for budget reasons. We are a stable, independent and constantly growing company built without venture capital therefore each euro we spend has to be earned first via our product sales.” Support subscription for the business-critical production systems Thanks to Proxmox VE and the DRBD/pacemaker setup, Daniel Wedewardt and his team could establish a highly robust and reliable infrastructure—at a cost far less than commercial solutions. Native Instruments also rely on the commercial Proxmox VE subscription service. Daniel Wedewardt explains why: “There is a really fantastic community behind the Proxmox VE project always providing help, but it was clear to us that professional support provides even more security—especially if you have business-critical systems running in a production cluster. It helps us sleep more calmly.” Daniel Wedewardt Director of IT, Native Instruments ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:52:10 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Exa Networks</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/exa-networks</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/exa-networks</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ "Exa Networks was founded in 2003 in the UK as an ISP dedicated to the business and education sector. Today we provide connectivity to thousands of organizations nationwide with state of the art high speed internet, providing our customers with dedicated dark fiber circuits." “Our in-house R&D team is responsible for several open source projects, one of them used by large multi-nationals such as CloudFlare, Facebook or the BBC. Exa Networks uses Proxmox VE to manage its KVM and Ceph infrastructure which is used to power some of our customer facing services, such as our Hosted E-mail and Cloud Content Filtering Solution, SurfProtect.” Thomas Mangin Technical Director, Exa Networks ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 14 Apr 2017 11:40:39 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Dalibo</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/dalibo</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/dalibo</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ "Proxmox VE has made it very easy for us to manage our production environments (consistent backups, migration, disaster recovery, firewalling) all with reduced investments in infrastructure." Dalibo ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 13 Mar 2017 14:32:35 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Smiles On Demand</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/smiles-on-demand</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/smiles-on-demand</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ "We successfully use a Ceph-backed highly available Proxmox VE cluster to run all our VMs, including Firewalls, PBXs, VPNs, Network Attached Storage, virtual desktops, e-learning systems and network monitoring tools. Uptime is an important factor for us as we operate 24/7, so we make good use of the HA and live migration functionality. Ceph also allows us to scale storage without any downtime which is a necessity for us." Graham Innes CEO & Founder, Smiles On Demand ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:52:47 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>NocRoom</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/nocroom</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/nocroom</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ NocRoom, LLC is a Miami-based company providing hosted PBX, VoIP, dedicated servers, colocation, and IP transit between the four US cities Fremont, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Miami. The company offers premium, high speed, all fiber network to their clients. Ivan Gonzales, CEO of NocRoom, says that for their offering of IP-based networks they use multiple servers all using virtualization technologies like Proxmox VE where stability is key. "In our setup each task like PBX, emails and file server is handled by its own virtual machine. Those crucial VM data is taking an additional measure and is configured with a highly available cluster, the Proxmox VE High Availability Cluster. Proxmox VE HA Cluster enables the definition of highly available virtual machines. In simple words, if a virtual machine (VM) is configured as HA and the physical host fails, the VM is automatically restarted on one of the remaining Proxmox VE cluster nodes." "Using the Proxmox technology we could design an offering for IP-based network helping our customers like for example the medical billing company BillNet Solutions to process more than 5000+ calls, 7000 emails and file sharing 1TB of data per day between its two locations. This customer rely on the latest technology for security and to keep all their locations acting as one single office - with over 100 employees this can be a challenge. All data from hosted PBX, emails and file sharing are encrypted in and out of the office network. With the new IP-based networks like hosted PBX, emails and open source software from Proxmox - all working smoothly together - we could help our customer to take advantage." Ivan Gonzalez Jr. CEO, NocRoom ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:13:08 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Open Source Osijek</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/open-source-osijek</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/open-source-osijek</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Open-Source Osijek” (OS@OS) is a center for program and system development based on open-source principles. It is a voluntary project located in the city of Osijek, Croatia and we are a team of specialist with many years of experience in software and project management gained in R&D for several enterprises. With the "Open-Source Osijek”-project we want to share our experience and knowledge with the community. We also want to raise awareness of open-source software, and provide basic knowledge about it. Additionally we want to demonstrate to the people in our region that it's very possible to develop high quality programs and systems using open-source software. Our main goal with OS@OS was to initiate a few projects led by us. At the same time we wanted to motivate people to start their own open-source projects with our supervision. Last but not least, also a goal was to support people during their entire development process and show them how to do it right. For accomplishing all these goals we needed hardware and a work environment. So we started a cooperation with Business Incubator Osijek (BIOS) for the entire infrastructure. Business Incubator Osijek (www.inkubator.hr) supports development of SMEs by providing them with office space, production facilities and other business-related services. Proxmox VE - From testing phase to full production At OS@OS we had many years of experience with all major virtualization platforms including the open-source server virtualization platform Proxmox Virtual Environment. For this new project we started using Proxmox VE first in testing phase, then in pre-production and finally in full production. We quickly notized that the Proxmox VE was already production-ready even for enterprise-grade systems. For OS@OS Proxmox Virtual Environment is the best server virtualization solution because it brings the following benefits to us and our users: Low cost Easy and centralized management Easy and reliable updates and upgrades Fast and easy deployment of virtual machines, and especially Linux containers Easy Backup/restore procedures for VM/CT Easy expansion to Proxmox VE cluster in the future: With online (live) migration and many useful enterprise features which are included in Proxmox VE as standard Advanced network models (we have decide to use OpenvSwitch) Scalable commercial support model available and many more small and big features that are needed in production After all the experiences we've made with Proxmox VE, we started recommending the, in our opinion, best open-source solution for virtualization and Linux containerization to our new work environment at BIOS. Implementing and integrating Proxmox VE In the years 2012/13 we implemented Proxmox VE as a pilot project into the Business Incubator Osijek infrastructure including all the necessary IT integrations. We installed Proxmox VE fitting the needs of Business Inkubator Osijek, our needs (OS@OS), and the needs of several companies inside BIOS. Soon after the initial setup, we started to integrate the first containers. And finally we started adding all the necessary tools for R&D inside these containers: Git, Redmine, Jenkins, Gerrit, OpenLDAP, mariaDB, DokuWiki, Apache Archiva, ... and many more. Later on we started a few projects inside our Linux containers, of which some are still active today. After a couple of month during which all of our containers ran stable, also pilot users from BIOS started to use the VMs and Linux containers inside Proxmox VE. Now, after two and a half years of intensive use we can say that Proxmox Virtual Environment is the ideal virtualization solution for us and for many other companies in our region. Up to now we had to manage around 20 upgrades, all of which we successfully completed without having any issues. We have done some network re-configurations inside Proxmox VE and network side, again without any problems. Up to now we have created hundreds of Linux containers and made abundant VM changes/upgrades/restarts etc. – never experiencing any problem. From our experiences, we can state that most (if not all) of the companies in our region will be satisfied with all the Proxmox VE features and its proven reliability, durability and stability. We see a lot of potential with Proxmox VE even for big companies here in our region. Our goal is to make them aware that they can use a whole Proxmox VE cluster with up to 16 nodes in version 3.4 and up to 32 nodes in version 4.x. What else to say guys...please continue with the great work :) Hrvoje Horvat Voluntary System & Network Engineer, OS@OS ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:08:30 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Ethiopian Civil Service University</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/ethiopian-civil-service-university</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/ethiopian-civil-service-university</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ The Proxmox VE platform helped the Ethiopian Civil Service University (ECSU) to virtualize the data center of their Development Learning Center. Via the data center they now can provide different web-based applications to offer e-learning services for the university. "Currently we run a large Drupal-based LMS application for our 17 master programs and 9 bachelor programs which is used by around 5000 students, an intranet for our university teachers, software of research and some other small applications, mostly drupal-based," explains Christian Zange, E-Learning Advisor at ECSU. "We also serve videos for our students, using a video-streaming-server. Each of our applications is running on a KVM machine with Ubuntu or Debian as operating system." Standardization and simplified recovery plans "Our performant IBM-Rackservers have dual CPUs and mostly 128 GB RAM each. It was very important to us to virtualize this environment in order to simplify recovery plans and to provide standardized environments for each application. Our virtual machines are secured automatically on an external backup system. If the main system crashes, the backup is online within no-time. No need to reconfigure a server or an application fiddling with different types of backup files." Multiple servers for applications, development and staging "Also, it's possible for us to have one server for each application and a number of development and staging servers for the next version of our e-learning system. We can prepare standardized server-layouts and start new instances with a tip of our fingers." "No need to install different types of applications with different server requirements on one single machine, or sharing a machine for development, testing and production. This tremendously improves stability of the system as a whole as well as security of our data." "We were able to achieve all of this ourselves - using the Proxmox VE installation media and online documentation. However, in the future we are planning to get properly trained through the Proxmox team and to implement many of the key features of Proxmox VE, like high availability. We also plan to attach external storage." Conclusion "We have been investigating different options, but Proxmox VE was the solution that we found to be the easiest one to use and yet powerful for any needs of a modern data center. No need to install any client software. The web interface provides complete control." "We have been very surprised how simple it is to virtualize with Proxmox: Installing it on our servers was simply a matter of 30 minutes per machine, including waiting times. It could not have been easier. Our system is running for almost two years now, and there have not been any problems." "I highly recommend Proxmox VE as a professional, fully-featured and yet affordable solution for server virtualization.” Christian Zange E-Learning Advisor, Ethiopian Civil Service University ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:07:31 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Institut Supérieur d'ingénierie Informatique</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/institut-superieur-d-ingenierie-informatique</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ ISITECH is an IT school based in Lyon, France. The school provides IT courses teaching system administration, networking, security and project management since 2007. ISITECH is forming the IT specialists of tomorrow, thanks to the suitability of trade oriented training cycles (IT certifications), working experience and by coaching their students. For their laboratory they needed a flexible and reliable virtualization solution and implemented Proxmox VE. Simoultaneous access for more than 40 students „Proxmox VE has extensive functionality, flexibility, and performance - characteristics we think really correspond to today’s infrastructure needs," says Cédric Patissier, IT Consultant at ISITECH. "Our main challenge at ISITECH was to manage that more than 40 students have simultaneous access to their VM pool and could connect to a dedicated physical network." "For us the greatest strength of Proxmox VE is its flexibility - whether in user management or in advanced network management. Also its flexibility to integrate easily on standard equipment available on the market." - Cédric Patissier Open-source and container-based virtualization "The fact that Proxmox VE has an open-source license is one of the reasons why we have chosen this virtualization solution – we have the possibility to adjust it with our own developments. Prior to deciding on Proxmox VE we have conducted a dedicated study in which we evaluated a couple of products in search of the one product allowing us to optimize schedule and costs. In the end, Proxmox's integration of container-based virtualization with OpenVZ did convince us – it is the best value for money we could find." Conclusion "Having tested the product against other alternative virtualization solutions, we can definitely confirm that Proxmox VE is a stable solution. For me, Proxmox ranges in the top 3 hypervisors of the moment available in the market." "On top, the solution also has been extremely well received by our team and students. We immediately have gained operational simplicity of services and an exciting performance." "With Proxmox VE there is everything we need – it is one of the best solutions in the market.“ Cédric Patissier IT Consultant, ISITECH ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:06:12 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Municipality of Trento</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/municipality-of-trento</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/municipality-of-trento</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ The city of Trento is located in the north-east of Italy and has about 100.000 inhabitants. The ‘Sistema Informativo’ department delivers most part of the Information Technology services to the municipality. The IT infrastructure counts more than 1.200 workstations which are distributed among about 20 different locations and connected via a city-owned backbone (optical fiber network) and several satellite WANs. Over 30 employees work for Sistema Informativo managing the complete infrastructure. Their main tasks consist of on-site hardware/software support and maintenance, software development of vertical applications, System and Network administration. All that persons have many years of experience in their respective fields; many of them formerly worked in the private sector, or at the local University. “What we see as the main problem with proprietary software, even if it's feature set is complete, is that you don't have things firmly under control. You have neither the chance to drill down to track problems, nor to ask someone you trust to do this on your behalf. You cannot decide when to update or upgrade, solely basing on your needs, because it's the software license owner who decides the timings when he wants and basing on his needs. In case you need profound customizations you can't do them, without asking the license owner. This whole situation with proprietary software has very strong impacts on Public Administrations, because they have to be particularly independent, especially in IT domain. FLOSS Software to grant Citizens Access to Public Services “The mission of public administration is to: ‘Serve the citizens as best as I can’. ‘Best’ means that the citizen's data has to be accessible, forever, and without any constraints; data has to be safe and protected from unauthorized access. These requirements of Public Administration services mean that they are best built on Open Standards and Technologies, allowing citizens to access them, for instance, with their Operating System of choice. FLOSS Software is the only way to grant all of these demands. “In Italy a law states the ‘digital rights’ for citizens in dealing with Public Administration called the ‘Law for Digital Administration’ ("Codice per l'Amministrazione Digitale"); article 68 clearly assigns a strong preference to FLOSS Software. Anyway, the freedom Free Software deserves does not come for free. Two Strategies for Choosing a Suitable Software Solution “To choose the suitable solutions, a strong competence is needed, and many times one single FLOSS solution is not suiting best your needs, but only a combination of some of them (Note: The same is applicable in general for proprietary solutions as well). “In many cases the software feature set is lacking something fundamental you need for your scenario. So, in general you could say that instead of investing in a large feature set (most of which is not valuable for you because you actually won't need it) in terms of proprietary license cost, you shift the investment towards tailoring individual features of FLOSS software on your needs. This requires a strategically move in one (or better: both) of the following two directions: You have to buy expertise from an external person or company you trust. You have to leverage more and more on your internal expertise. “So a FLOSS solution is not necessarily less expensive than a proprietary one; but the key argument is that you can choose on HOW and on WHAT to spend your money. And in general that money does not nourish yet another global player, but can be regarded as an opportunity for local economy (choice 1) or a way for increasing internal team value (choice 2). FLOSS is then the best way to increase the value of a well-motivated team, if it happens you have one. It turns what is ordinarily only regarded as "labor cost" into a productive investment in ‘human resources’. Combining Internal with External Expertise “In our experience, the best results come from a combination of the two approaches, because relying only in internal expertise could lead to ‘blind alleys’ where technical solutions are over-engineered and difficult to maintain in the long term. A partnership with (carefully chosen) external expertise may lead to a real community, where ideas and solutions are freely discussed and becomes more easily exportable to other public bodies (which are a real must for cutting costs in Public Administration as a whole). How Proxmox VE fits into this Strategy “Proxmox VE is a real use case for these concepts; we heard of it for the first time some years ago, attending a sysadmin course organized by the local Linux User Group. It was PVE version 1.4, if I remember well, and the person talking, Giuliano ‘Diaolin’ Natali, is one of the prominent FLOSS experts and Entrepreneurs in our province (his company, OpenIt, is now Proxmox partner). “So we came over Proxmox VE and found it to be an ideal virtualization solution. It is built on Debian GNU/Linux, which was already our distribution of choice for Linux servers, so it was easy to integrate and we could benefit from the already existing know-how of our team. “In addition, Proxmox is based on KVM, the most promising free/libre software solution for hardware virtualization. But it also offers OpenVZ as a lightweight container based alternative. To help us simplify management, it provides a very nice and powerful web based interface, out of the box. Additionally, Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the project, is offering scalable support options; as our needs grow, we can easily scale which gives us a lot of flexibility. “Our server hardware was gradually being phased out, in favor of blade systems, which featured hardware virtualization. This enabled us to afford KVM virtualization for all our servers (formerly only Linux ones were virtual, because only Linux allowed non-hardware virtualization). KVM was already part of the vanilla kernel, ensuring us not getting stuck in a proprietary solution. Hardware Replacement Rate sets Data Center Consolidation “The consolidation of the data center evolved naturally over one or two years, following hardware replacement rate. The entire "Sistema Informativo" data center is now built on the Proxmox VE platform. Currently, the department runs ten production instances of Proxmox VE, as well as three clusters that form the real core of the data center. In total, they have about 80 VMs, running a mixture of Microsoft Windows and Debian operating systems. With this setup they serve the needs of more than 1.200 internal workstations, and several on-line services. Most of the hosts are on blade hardware, served by a fiber channel Storage Area Network. “Currently this infrastructure is managed by three system administrators, each one being involved in many other activities, not virtualization related, such as software development, user assistance, etc. The availability of the data center is now very high, with less than ten issues per year (and only one or two impacting end users). “An example of how we leveraged on FLOSS flexibility in our PVE usage is the backup strategy. Leveraging FLOSS Flexibility: Custom File System Backup Solution Since reliable file system backup was a major issue, "Sistema Informativo" implemented a custom backup solution based on BackupPC and LVM based snapshots. Resoli explains: “One of the immediate benefits we saw with Proxmox VE was the accomplished cost savings obtained replacing a very pricey proprietary snapshot feature of the SAN with host LVM based snapshots. With the LVM based snapshot feature provided by Linux Operating System, which is at the base of Proxmox VE, and thanks to the very smooth, modular and noninvasive integration of PVE features into the OS, we were able to build a custom backup solution based on BackupPC that exactly fits our needs. We contributed the solution to the Proxmox community where it is now available also to other users. This solution is now leveraging on Proxmox VE also on the storage side, combined with a custom offsite encrypting synchronization feature based on DRBD. (see: Filesystem Level Backups with LVM Snapshots) “The hardware setup comprises two twin servers with autonomous storage (in order the backup not to depend from SAN infrastructure), both with PVE onboard; one server is placed locally, and the other offsite. At the moment two BackupPC virtual machines are running on the local server, each one dealing with a 2TB backup pool. “The storage is configured on the PVE physical host on three layers: LVM -> DRBD -> dmcrypt, the latter being presented to the vm. The DRBD layer is asynchronously connected with the remote PVE server. So, after nightly backups, the activation of the connection between the two DRBD peers is scheduled. Given that DRBD is under dm-crypt layer, all exchanged synchronization data are already encrypted, and remote data are encrypted as well. The local server performs one time a week a non-encrypted tape dump (using dump/restore standard unix commands) using a snapshot of the LVM pool volume and drbd - crypt layers created on the fly over it. Benefits Generally speaking Proxmox VE allowed us to build a solid virtualization platform that fits exactly our needs; It is lightweight and easy to access thanks to an excellent web user interface. It allowed us to increase the availability of our services thanks to the live migration feature during updates/upgrades. Proxmox VE is highly customizable and easy to adapt to the evolving structure of our hardware setup. Last but not least, savings in license costs were geared in useful directions: buying support from Proxmox (really excellent), and acquiring expertise (internal or external). Consolidating all our servers on Proxmox VE reduced considerably the system administration burden, freeing precious resources to dedicate to our core business: Serve the Citizens. “Over the years we have watched the Proxmox VE project flourish, strictly following the fast pace of development of KVM and OpenVZ features, but also integrating many other emerging open source technologies like GlusterFS or Ceph in a very nice fashion. “Our main goals were to improve security and reliability and at the same time minimize the dependency on proprietary solutions. In conclusion, we found Proxmox VE a very effective, scalable, flexible and powerful virtualization solution, with constantly increasing features. Keeping in mind that it is a really open, clean and modular product, we are confident that Proxmox VE will satisfy our future needs, as well.” Roberto Resoli System Administrator and Senior Programmer, Sistema Informativo ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 13:53:53 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER)</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/griver</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ Mexican based GRIVER offers specialized services for the foreign trade and customs market. Although a small company, at some point they had to deal with 50 physical servers each one performing a very specific task. Valentín Ortiz Ferretiz, IT manager from GRIVER, explains why they have been looking for a virtualization solution and finally chose Proxmox Virtual Environment. “In IT departments you must often do your work with a very limited budget, and at the same time you must guarantee that there will be no negative effects to the quality or performance of the services." "We have found in Proxmox VE a robust and reliable platform that allows us to reuse our current infrastructure with minor investments in hardware and software licensing. We only had to increase the RAM memory and add a few more NIC cards to connect three clustered Proxmox servers to the iSCSI SAN,” states Valentín. Avoiding major investments by reusing current infrastructure GRIVER could quickly virtualize 20 of their physical servers, simplifying the server administration, reducing the power consumption and at the same time increasing the availability of their services. Wiki and a growing community “We also evaluated Citrix XenServer and VMware. Both are really good products, but the licensing costs made them unreachable to us,” says Valentín. “With Proxmox VE we do not have to consider neither licensing nor costs, but we were worried about upgrades and the lack of a ‘serious’ documentation before we started to use it." "Soon after testing the product and reviewing the documentation, we could confirm that it was excellent software and especially supported by a constantly growing community." - Valentín Ortiz Ferretiz Upgrade from 1.9 to Proxmox VE 3.2 "We started working with Proxmox VE at version 1.9, and we were surprised by how easy it was to install and to administrate. It has a very intuitive web interface and allows you to make complex configurations easily." "Today, we have installed Proxmox 3.2 on a newly acquired server. At the moment our VMs are being migrated from the Proxmox 1.9 cluster to the new 3.2 machine. On the new server, we already have 32 or 64 bits KVM versions of Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008, and Linux Centos." Conclusion "I recommend Proxmox for those IT professionals who want to increase the availability of their servers, to reduce the administration complexity and also to make the most of their IT budget.” Valentín Ortiz Ferretiz IT manager, Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER) ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 20 Feb 2017 13:45:58 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd.</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/dynacom-tankers-management-ltd</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ Markos Vakondios and Dimitris Beletsiotis from Greek Dynacom Tankers Management decided to acquire advanced virtualization know-how to be well prepared in designing their new data center based on Proxmox Virtual Environment. In April 2014 they participated in the training Proxmox VE Advanced at Odiso (now: Cyllene), an authorized Proxmox training partner in France. "The seminar was carried out in a very professional and efficient way, focusing on our actual needs and driven by our questions and comments. The training topics covered all of the advanced aspects of Proxmox VE, as well as an overview on aspects with which we already were familiar with, focusing only on the important details. All the topics that we really needed familiarization with were fully covered in detail, with hands-on examples and labs." "Our trainer, Mr Alexandre Derumier, is an expert with Proxmox VE, with a lot of experience in the 'real life' usage of the software and other closely related technologies such as ZFS, SANs, etc. He was able to transfer the knowledge openly and clearly, addressing the most important aspects of the subject, as well as indicating crucial details, essential to prevent us from production level pitfalls." "Overall, it was a pleasant and productive experience, offering exactly what we were looking for, helping us to gain both theoretical and practical experience to get off the ground in designing our new data center based on Proxmox VE." Markos Vakondios / Dimitris Beletsiotis Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd. About Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd. Dynacom Tankers Management Ltd. (DTM) was founded in 1991 to manage oil tankers. Since 1991 DTM’s fleet has been significantly expanded and modernized and the company has developed a strong network of customer relationships and a reputation for transportation excellence among quality-sensitive customers. DTM has a strong presence in the oil industry, delivering over 1.8 million barrels of cargo daily, with vessels calling at more than 1,000 ports yearly – linking international economies and serving customers worldwide. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 05 Sep 2016 18:16:48 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Municipal Emergency Hospital in Córdoba, Argentina</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/municipal-emergency-hospital-in-cordoba-argentina</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ In the Municipal Emergency Hospital of Cordoba (Argentina), Pablo Hamann of the hospital's IT department implemented Proxmox VE to help facilitate the digitization of pre-medical imaging studies, as well as to achieve independence of hardware, and to facilitate management tasks of servers. The implementation was executed in various phases and results satisfactory to the whole staff. The Municipal Emergency Hospital in the city of Cordoba, is the health care center for medical emergencies in Greater Cordoba (a metropolitan area including the city of Cordoba and surrounding towns), in the province of Cordoba, Argentina. Cordoba is the second largest city in Argentina (just behind the capital of the Republic Buenos Aires). There are three public hospitals in Cordoba, of which the largest one is the Municipal Emergency Hospital. With nearly 700 employees it provides public and free health care to all people arriving with a medical emergency (even foreigners). The Municipal Emergency Hospital is specialized on the treatment of polytraumas, since one of the main causes of serious accidents with multiple injuries are road accidents. The Traumatology is the largest of the 15 medical services the hospital offers. Additionally, the hospital offers auxiliary services to complement the medical services: the most important one of which is the Diagnostic Imaging Service and consists of radiology, tomography, angiography and ultrasound. Half a million imaging studies annually requires an optimized infrastructure To date, approximately 1.500 emergency patients per week are attended at the Municipal Emergency Hospital. As a routine, all patients are first of all checked with a pre-medical imaging study, for sure depending on the severity of their injuries. Meanwhile, the amount of imaging studies generated is so huge (almost half a million studies annually) that we decided to digitalize the entire system to help streamline it. On the same time we also had an eye to reducing operating costs. When the management of the Emergency Hospital decided to digitalize the diagnostic imaging studies, the main specific requirement was to implement a system called in Spanish "BBB” (Bueno, Bonito y Barato - translates to: good, beautiful and cheap)" with fault tolerant...nothing more and nothing less. IT infrastructure at its limit At this point there were only a few Windows servers running directly on a cloned bare-metal, USD 200 in the hospital's IT department. The whole IT infrastructure had been growing steadily in the last years: More and more workstations, more users, more printers, more network devices. And finally adding the medical appliances on top, it was way to much for the existing infrastructure. At this time we were busy with rushing out in panic and bying replacements for some broken server hardware. Of course, all this caused enormous headaches and huge dissatisfaction to all of our staff. Apart from that, the workstations turned out to be simple and dumb terminals, unable to do anything. This finally lead to the wake-up call that we badly needed a virtualization solution. Purchase of additional servers opens the door for virtualization At some point, to run new servers, we had to make a purchase decision for the hardware. At this time it was clear to us that virtualization was the only way to go if we wanted to achieve hardware independence, and facilitate maintenance tasks on the server. It was also clear that this new hardware would be designated exclusively to our two PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) servers, that we already had tested on cloned equipment. PACS is a technology for digital archiving DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). The server software would have been heavy enough to justify the non-virtualization and run them directly on the metal. A proprietary solution doesn't seem appropriate for public entity But years before I had been working at the Laboratory of Information Systems at the Regional Faculty Córdoba, National Technological University (LabSis), and there I had been amazed with the early implementations of QEMU/KVM which the lab had been using in production. So when the time came to expand the infrastructure of servers in the Emergency Hospital, I saw the opportunity to implement a cluster on GNU/Debian with QEMU/KVM virtualization as a core, and thus run on them not only PACS servers, but also Windows servers that existed previously running on the bare metal. And even though I was still unaware of the existence of Proxmox VE, it was clear to me that I did not want to "marry" with any proprietary solution for such a task: Neither VMware vSphere, nor Microsoft's Hyper-V, nor Citrix Xen proved or are appropriate, in my honest opinion, for a public environment with the characteristics of our Municipal Emergency Hospital. The opportunity: getting to know the open-source solution Proxmox VE Luckily we got introduced to Proxmox VE by an external IT professional we contracted. I was really surprised: Proxmox VE was (and is) for me the proverbial "kid's dream" (argentinian expression meaning a "big dream" or "unachievable"). On the one hand, Proxmox VE facilitated for us many problems concerning the cluster implementation, also the backup management, and the production start of iSCSI disk storage. On the other hand, it provided a friendly, simple and well made web interface, which of course, allowed us to get independent from the software from the clients computer. This definitely helped to convince the management, initially a bit more inclined to some other solution like Microsoft Hyper-V. Hardware we used As a public entity, the Municipal Emergency Hospital always tries hard to minimize all costs, including the hardware costs. The purchase of hardware was therefore realized in several steps and finally consisting in the following: three servers IBM System x3650 M4, equipped with one 16-core microprocessor, 64GB of RAM, 8 disks 1TB SAS-2, 4-port gigaethernet one server IBM System x3250 M5, equipped with one microprocessor 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, 4 SATA 1TB-3, 4-port gigaethernet one storage disk IBM DS3524 SAS-2, 4 channels iSCSI gigalan one IBM TS3200 Tape Library Backup equipped with two SAS-2 interfaces The implementation of Proxmox VE We first started with a simple implementation of Proxmox VE. For the first couple of months we virtualized only two Windows with the PACS servers on a default installation of a newly released PVE 3.2. It was fabulous. The boss of services loved it: all we had done was to install and use PVE (style "install and use", without configuring anything). In fact, not even the cluster had been configured yet. The simplicity of installation and use convinced the management. Six months later, we finally configured the entire cluster. And month by month we started virtualizing all our previously existing physical servers. A year later we updated to version Proxmox VE 3.4 without any problems, and all storage tanks were reconfigured: the VMs (which were at least 10) were moved to the storage of a large volume configured as iSCSI LVM disks; and all disks of each server were used to create ZFS pools, with backup purposes. The following year (January 2016) we updated our entire cluster to Proxmox VE 4.1. This was done via apt with only minimal change to the configuration, and without any problem (at this point I thought I was dreaming). The move to version 4.1 was motivated by curiosity but also by necessity: the tape library still was waiting to be configured, and only had SAS ports available. The only chance to use it with the VMs was to connect via SAS to one of the PVE servers, and then export it via iSCSI. We used SCST for this, but it certainly had problems with the 2.6 kernel (base of the 3.x series of PVE). Once we moved to the 4.x branch (Proxmox VE now shipped with kernel 4.x), we could implement SCST without any major problem. So we successfully could export the library iSCSI. The final configuration setup and the benefits Currently, our implementation of Proxmox VE consists of a cluster of the 4 servers mentioned above. Taking advantage that each server has 4 ports giga Ethernet, the connection between nodes is configured using LACP bonding (2 ports for the nodes LAN in TRUNK mode and 2 ports for iSCSI LAN) with Open vSwitch, (aptitude install openvswitch-ipsec). On each computer, the installation is performed on a 2-RAID disk mirroring (RAID1) per hardware, using LVM. On each computer, the remaining disks are configured in RAID 5 per hardware, and each disk maintains it's own ZFS pool, intended to keep the backups. The disk storage is set to RAID 6 (for hardware), and contains a single large LVM volume, which is common to all nodes in the cluster and whose purpose is storing the VMs. The tape library is connected via SAS to one of the PVE servers, and is exported by iSCSI using SCST, this way, it can be used by any VM in the cluster. In the cluster VM, there are currently about 15 VMs running each of them with a very specific function: we have a network controller wireless Ubiquiti UniFi (Debian), two domain controllers ActiveDirectory (Win2012R2), a LAMP (Debian) server, NVR UniFi airVision (Debian), a PXE server (Debian), an application server (one Debian, another Windows), etc.. And of course, the PACS (WIN2008R2) servers which, although consuming a huge amount of resources, do not affect the overall performance. The only thing not virtualized, is a FreeBSD server (based on pfSense) acting as IPv4 + 6 router, as well as a storage implementation of homemade discs (craft rather...) for general tests (also implemented with Proxmox VE, but not part of the cluster). Magic in action If for some reason we would have to shut down one of the nodes, the VMs configured to keep running, still will run, and those not will go down... no rushing in at dawn :-) If any VM is damaged, we simply restore the latest backup available, and it will continue working... we do not have to go out looking desperately for an identical hardware to the damaged one. So live really became easier :-) Pablo Alejandro Hamann IT departement, Hospital de Urgencias, Municipalidad de Córdoba ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2016 17:42:29 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Compination GmbH</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/compination</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ „Our story in virtualization dates back quite some time. Initially, we were using SUN Microsystems Servers and built the services needed for our customers using Solaris Zones. The reason for this was quite simple: At that time, Solaris was still free of use – and Linux wasn't quite where it is now. Which virtualization software fits our needs? "We already played around with VMware (Workstation) in 1999 but it was not before 2003 (with VMware Server and later ESXi) when it was really usable for real server virtualization purposes. Although VMware was a good solution, some things were really annoying us as well as our customers. For example, there was the client software which didn't really work on nothing else but Windows. As we had to support customers with different versions, it pretty soon became kind of messy. And more, over time VMware became more and more bloated." "Alternatives? Sure! But Xen wasn't much better there... and with it's 32Bit kernel beneath the solution it was not really feasible for us. It looked well on the surface, but if you had to dig deeper it's real ugliness became obvious." "So we had to ask ourselves where do we get a solution that is sleek, fast, efficient, and not a mess to support? Being a NetApp Partner, the integrability of NetApp Storage Systems was a priority, too. (I have to admit that at this feature, VMware really has some sweet spots to offer.)" "Then, some years ago we discovered Proxmox Virtual Environment. At that time it was on release 0.9. It was not yet exactly what we really wanted to present to our customers...but at least it left a mark. Soon, with the release of Proxmox VE 1.0 we gave it a try and moved our complete production environment to Proxmox. All-In." "If we told you now that there has never been an issue, we wouldn't be honest. But for every issue arising we found a quick solution on the forums (keep in mind, Proxmox VE didn't offer commercial subscriptions at that time). Support from the Proxmox team was superb, too. The staff has always been very helpful – and still is...and this at the most impossible times (migrations mostly take place when Joe Average sleeps)." Proxmox VE simply works "Over time, we virtualized more and more hardware devices. Today, we run a fully virtualized stack including firewalls, Routers, VPN-Gateways, and more. We build our complete solutions around Proxmox VE – and it really works and scales outstandingly well. Be it a small infrastructure with ATOM based servers or big, fat Cisco UCS systems – Proxmox VE just works." "Over the lasts couple of years we also have migrated several VMware infrastructures to Proxmox VE. Reasons were on the one hand because of the many changes concerning VMware licensing and pricing, but on the other hand because the overhead of Proxmox VE is – in our point of view – massively smaller, simply because you are able to use LXC (Linux Containers). Even the integrability with NetApp Systems, although not (yet) officially supported by Proxmox, is easily possible today." Dockerized apps with Proxmox's LXC containers "Today, we are watching all the hype around Docker. And we often wonder why zoned virtualization views such a rise in popularity just now although it's not a new concept at all, and we have been using LXC for ages now. But also our customers benefit a lot because we already implement large parts of their infrastructure using LXC and thus saving loads of CPU cycles…" "Back to Docker: with most of the solutions offered today, the only way to get Docker up and running is to set up a VM and place Docker inside... Honestly? That actually turns the whole zoning useless. With Proxmox VE, LXC is available and it is exactly the right thing for dockerized apps." "With the move to version 4.2, Proxmox has completely re-designed the UI – which is a huge improvement. But why, one might ask, didn't they wait until version 5? Well, because they don't have to. And because, obviously, the marketing department of Proxmox is technology driven (and not as in many other companies vice verca)." "Proxmox is everything we ever wanted from a virtualization solution: KISS-Principle FAST Reliable Flexible Scalable Easy to handle Easy to support Easy to integrate Future proof Based on standards "And the best thing: It still gets better with every release.“ Tobias Göller CTO, Compination GmbH ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 12 Aug 2016 14:09:29 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Free Software Foundation Europe</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/free-software-foundation-europe</link>
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			<description><![CDATA[ Free Software Foundation Europe is Europe's leading advocacy organisation for Free Software, working since to raise awareness for software freedom since 2001. "Having used container-based virtualisation for some years already, FSFE wanted to switch to a modern and flexible virtualisation platform for our recently donated servers", states Martin Gollowitzer, Voluntary System Administrator at FSFE. "FSFE's sysadmin team looked into different options, and Proxmox VE turned out to provide exactly what we needed: High availability features, ease of use and proper integration of a shared storage technology (Ceph) without the need to set up separate storage systems." "FSFE's admin team was surprised by both the simplicity of the setup of the cluster nodes as well as the intuitive web interface. We also found the noVNC console very convincing." - Martin Gollowitzer "Of course, any solution used by FSFE needs to be free software, and Proxmox VE is available under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). FSFE is using both OpenVZ containers and highly available KVM machines to provide different services to its staff and volunteers. The operating system of choice in the virtual machines is Debian GNU/Linux, on which Proxmox VE itself is based as well. Depending on future requirements, any Free Software operating system might follow. Martin Gollowitzer Voluntary System Administrator, FSFE ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 02 Feb 2015 17:21:33 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>Digital Media Distribution AG</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/digital-media-distribution-ag</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/digital-media-distribution-ag</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Originally started in a garage in 2004, DMD² has become the leading provider of music services for businesses in Switzerland. Around one million of listeners per day in over 1.000 points of sale, music in over 150 hotels and restaurants around the world distributed via the internet, cable or satellite, and more than 700.000 online visitors per month, DMD² meets the demands on contemporary creation, refinement and distribution of multimedia content. „Proxmox VE is the open source virtualization solution of choice at DMD² since 2010. At first we used it for development, but soon we had it on production servers, too. We virtualize several versions of Windows server and Linux distributions. One of the crucial parts of our multimedia services is high availability and this is exactly where Proxmox VE supports us." "With Proxmox VE we could minimize the number of physical servers and administrative tasks significantly, and with standardization we managed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO). Additionally, we now have a flexible and scalable infrastructure with which we can easily respond to many changes." "At this stage Proxmox VE satisfies all relevant quality criteria of a professional business IT environment. We at DMD² see this proved by the professional support services and the active community around the open source product.“ Thomas Zumbrunnen CTO, Digital Media Distribution AG ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2015 17:21:01 +0100</pubDate>
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			<title>inDenova</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/indenova</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/indenova</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ inDenova is a Spanish ICT company, specialized in solutions and advanced developments of electronic signature and BPM, security, digital certificates applied to eGovernment, eBusiness, eCommerce and Mobility. inDenova has developed its own technology, which allows to tailor its solutions to any customer need. “We are using Proxmox VE since version 1.8. At the beginning, we started with VMware server free, but now we have everything running on Proxmox VE 3.1," tells Oscar Güde Berenguer, IT manager at inDenova. "Hopefully, in the future, there will be more compatibility with all internet browsers but it is one of the best virtualization products we have seen so far!" "We have more than 250 virtual machines for internal IT and we also have implemented Proxmox VE for some customers - with very positive results. All in all, we have about 300 virtual machines running, everything is easy to manage and migration is even easier." "We are using Proxmox VE for different operating systems servers such as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, SUSE, and Windows server platforms. On all of them we have several services running like Apache, Tomcat, Oracle, MySQL, SQLServer and FileServers." "Proxmox VE made it possible to simplify the management and deployment of server platforms and services for our IT infrastructure. Thank you for this great product!” Oscar Güde Berenguer IT manager, inDenova ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 13:51:49 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>SwitchMIA</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/switchmia</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/switchmia</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ SwitchMIA is a global provider of optimized network solutions that offer the best possible performance, reliability and availability. The advanced, IP-based networks deliver data, voice, and content to clients and partners world-wide. The company offerings include colocation, transit, transport, VoIP and network-based services. “Hello, I'd like to say your system is the best we have seen and easiest to use. We now config 49 servers to Proxmox VE clustered and from what we have seen the performance is better than dedicated itself." "Two of the reasons why we started using virtualization were cost factor and system resources. We have noticed a price drop for dedicated servers and not all clients really use all their resources. We found fully managed enterprise VM's is the best bang for the buck based on what the clients really need on hand." The fact that you can add additional storage on the fly and the very easy to use console are the features we like the most. - Ivan Gonzalez Jr. "So we evaluated several virtualization solutions, but we finally chose Proxmox VE because most of the other solutions seemed a bit harder to use and not having such a friendly UI, plus the installation is a breeze. Although at the beginning we were not sure about stability, we now can tell that it is definitely stable. The system is so well put together that we never had a single problem from day 1 of starting Proxmox VE last year." "The fact that you can add additional storage on the fly and the very easy to use console are the features we like the most. We are now 80% Proxmox and use it for all Linux and Windows. The hardware we use are 32core 256GB RAM server and we have currently 47 of them and growing. We are in the process of moving over existing dedicated server clients into VM's as well." "We already referred other businesses to use Proxmox VE. They have taken our advice and now we see them extremely happy. Thank you for your hard work!” Ivan Gonzalez Jr. Colocation and Enterprise VM Sales and CFO at SwitchMIA, LLC- Miami Datacenter ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 11:52:52 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>ISCaD GmbH</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/iscad-gmbh</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/iscad-gmbh</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ “Currently, we have 35 Proxmox VE systems running in-house at ISCaD GmbH as well as at our customers. We are very happy with the cost-performance ratio and all the nice features of the Virtual Environment. Particularly, GlusterFS and SPICE are important new features which meet our needs. If we could make a wish, we’d love to see some enhanced support for ARM.” Friedhelm Matten CEO, ISCaD GmbH About ISCaD ISCaD is an engineering office founded in 2000. The company realizes extensive projects together with selected partner companies and freelancers, delivering their services to customers like Informix Deutschland GmbH, Deutsche Telekom AG, Region Hannover, NICOLAI Sanitätshäuser, EXPO 2000, and many more. The focus lies on consulting, design, and implementation of applications in the JEE area, including virtualized and fail-safe complete systems (using Proxmox VE as virtualization platform). ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:48:02 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Valmiera City Council</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/valmiera-city-council</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/valmiera-city-council</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Valmiera City Council provides public services to almost 30.000 inhabitants and combines 32 institutions including schools, kindergardens and public service institutions. “Proxmox VE has become the main server virtualization platform for the Valmiera City Council,” says Janis Berzins, Head of the council’s IT department. “We started to test Proxmox VE in 2010 to find out if this environment would fit our needs and now, four years later, we use it as primary virtualization solution." Proxmox helps keep virtualization simple and organized and it provides an astonishing snapshot backup solution. - Janis Berzins "At the moment we have 12 physical servers running Proxmox VE with approximately 120 virtual servers. Proxmox helps keep virtualization simple and organized and it provides an astonishing snapshot backup solution. By using Proxmox VE we have managed to save money that we can invest in hardware and better network solutions." Valmiera City Council provides public services to almost 30.000 inhabitants and combines 32 institutions including schools, kindergardens and public service institutions. "The council’s IT department is challenged with a huge IT environment," Janis explains. "We take care of more than 1.000 workstations and have to provide many different services. And this is where Proxmox VE comes into play: It is so easy to use, that it can be done by one system administrator at our IT department." "After all, in public administration, it’s our duty to keep costs low without influence on the quality of services. It always seems easier to choose a commercial product and contract someone to get the work done for you." On top of that, for us as public administration, it is really important that we demonstrate responsible use of taxpayers’ money by choosing open-source solutions. - Janis Berzins "But with Proxmox VE you can get these two factors together: It is a low-cost solution, it does neither affect quality nor security and it’s easy to use so you can handle it yourself. On top of that, for us as public administration, it is really important that we demonstrate responsible use of taxpayers’ money by choosing open-source solutions.” Janis Berzins Head of IT department, Valmiera City Council ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Alpha IT AS</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/alpha-it-as</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/alpha-it-as</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Alpha IT AS delivers the full spectrum of IT services for small to medium businesses, ranging from server and workstation hosting, hardware acquisition, and network setups down to support, maintenance and updates for their clients. “I first came across Proxmox VE when I started working at Alpha IT AS," explains Jørgen Vehusheia, system administrator at Alpha IT. "Before, I had only limited experience with virtualization systems. The reason was that I have always been told, and indeed experienced by my own, that dealing with virtual machines was a hassle that you just never want a part of: Virtualized systems always have terrible performance issues, I was told. And indeed, I found the systems I’ve tested to be cumbersome to install, and it was always troublesome to get good information out of the central system." Proxmox VE sits at the core of our business, and that is very unlikely to change. - Jørgen Vehusheia "I quickly discovered that Proxmox VE makes a lot of this hassle disappear. It gives you easy access to all the information you need. And where with other software I had to hack a workaround to any problem that came up, I usually find that Proxmox VE already has an out of the box feature that does exactly what I need." "Thus far, I’ve handled VM migration, Proxmox version updates, VM access sharing, routine updates and maintenance to VMs, as well as some support work, installation of additional software on clients’ VMs and the likes. If I can’t quickly discern how to handle a task from the UI alone, the wiki has the answer practically every time. The one time I got really stuck, the online support chat did sort out my problem within moments." "Our company delivers the full spectrum of IT services for small to medium businesses. Currently we have over 50 virtual servers and about 600 virtual user PCs running, and the Proxmox VE solution, simply put, enables me to handle my workload while easily keeping up with how our systems are doing. It saves us time, money, and server rack space. Proxmox VE sits at the core of our business, and that is very unlikely to change.” Jørgen Vehusheia System administrator, Alpha IT ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 13:49:10 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>IT-Services - Hamburg e.K.</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/it-services-hamburg</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/it-services-hamburg</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ IT-Services Hamburg e.K. is a small IT service company in Hamburg, Germany providing full IT services to small and medium-sized enterprises. Since their start in 1999, the company did set up plenty of networks for their customers, and their everyday tasks include mainly remote-services and helpdesk support via phone, TeamViewer, SSH and Remote Desktop (RDP). IT-Services Hamburg works closely with Fujitsu as their main hardware provider. “We first spotted Proxmox VE back in 2008 when we were at the development department of one of our customers,” says Joerg Hanebuth, CEO of IT-Services Hamburg, a small IT service provider in Germany. "They create mobile and console MMORPG-games and have a huge amount of development servers. Since then we kept an eye on Proxmox VE and after a few month we decided to test it on an old Fujitsu 4C Xeon, with 16GB RAM and three 146GB SAS-disks." "Honestly, we were surprised by its performance and intuitive GUI." - Joerg Hanebuth "Proxmox VE seemed to us to be a simple way to manage data centers, so we started testing clustering and all the other features. We also tested a lot of failure scenarios like power fails, network fails, and damaged configurations and so on. We produced some really hard crashes but we never have lost even one byte of data!" "In 2010 we started replacing VMware in our own data center because of its weird and overpriced licenses. Proxmox VE runs on a RX300 cluster with a small storage device and we like the fact that we don’t have to care much about it." "Last year we began to set up Proxmox VE for our customers. Since, we have been able to accomplish several successful migration tasks from VMware to Proxmox VE." "We are happy to have found Proxmox VE. For us, it has been a very performant, high reliable virtualization solution over the past 4 years and we are happy to pay our small fee to keep it going.” Joerg Hanebuth Founder & CEO at IT-Services, Hamburg e.K. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 13:41:00 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Laut und Schoen</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/laut-und-schoen</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/laut-und-schoen</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Laut und Schoen is an agency for marketing and design based in the German city of Frankfurt. The interdisciplinary team of specialists offers strategic consulting and the creative and technical implementation in all media areas. Within the scope of a service offered in communication and IT-consulting, Laut und Schoen replaced a Windows Small Business Server for one of their customers lacking an own IT department. The job also included the integration of external staff via VPN. After years of uncontrolled growth the customer’s IT environment had turned into chaos: Over the years every single external software supplier had installed their proper hardware and operating systems, which would fit their products. The purpose of the customer was to eliminate this chaos. Organizing IT chaos after years of uncontrolled growth First, a small business setup of three physical servers was replaced with Proxmox VE. The VMs (OpenVZ and KVM) now running are an Ubuntu Server for Zarafa (as replacement for Microsoft Exchange), and an OpenVPN appliance. A proprietary business application served as terminal server sessions on an old SuSE 9.3. Then there was another single PC for a work-time-logging system, which was virtualized too. “As final result, the implementation of Proxmox VE helped us to cut down the electricity bill significantly by reducing the power consumption of two servers and one PC. Our customer is now able to run old applications and operating systems on modern hardware.” Norbert Micheel On top, one of the servers had an old, expensive hardware maintenance contract which could be cancelled within the new setup. Time-saving approach with Proxmox VE “To me, as an IT manager who is constantly lacking time, it was fast and easy to immerse myself in Proxmox VE because it offers a far more time-saving approach than other compared systems." "For our rather small customers, Proxmox is definitely appropriate and offers the big advantage that it is scalable in the future. At the moment the implemented virtual environment is stable and has not seen any problems.” Norbert Micheel Head of IT, Laut und Schoen ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jul 2014 11:20:58 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>Serwise AG</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/serwise-ag</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/serwise-ag</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ Founded in 1997, Serwise AG is a successful IT consulting and service company operating in Switzerland and Germany, and is specialized in data warehousing and big data business analytics. The company’s strategy is to choose open-source software for their internal IT department whenever possible. Before discovering Proxmox Virtual Environment, Serwise applied VMware as virtualization solution and implemented the software for customers. But as VMware licensing became more and more confusing and the internal open-source strategy forced them to change, the company began to evaluate open-source software solutions like Citrix XenServer and Proxmox VE. Serwise AG finally decided in favor of Proxmox VE because there is no license required (in contrast to XenServer) and the Serwise IT consultants were really impressed by its simplicity, performance and flexibility. Up to now, the company has never regretted the decision. A completely virtualized environment with IBM Flex System Enterprise and Proxmox VE Serwise runs all their services on Proxmox VE today; there are no more natively installed environments: “We virtualize our Microsoft server, our domain infrastructure, and our Exchange server with KVM as well as the time recording and our financial accounting,” explains Frank Ihringer, CEO of Serwise AG. “On OpenVZ containers we have the complete market platform “schnappundweg.eu” (Java, PostgreSQL, Hibernate, Spring, Wicket, Apache …) with three servers per instance (Dev, Test, Int, Prod). These servers all run on Debian, and by using OpenVZ containers they have an incredibly great performance and an extra slim virtualization layer.” A new IBM Flex System Enterprise with four nodes has been installed at Serwise since end of 2013. For many years, the company had been using the free community version of Proxmox VE. Today, Proxmox VE (including the subscription service) is running on three nodes with a total of six processors in a datacenter. Until June 2014 there are likely to be three more nodes with six processors to be added. All applications are being transferred to the new infrastructure at the moment. For Serwise, the benefits are obvious: “Proxmox VE reveals real sensational performance and comfort values in a BladeCenter/SAN environment (IBM/EMC),” says Frank Ihringer. Conclusion “The performance of Proxmox VE is simple to explain: it’s the same like the hardware below. Or to say it in other words: We have never noticed any degradation – not even with big data bases in data warehouse environments or with very big in-memory OLAP data bases like IBM Cognos TM1 with huge dimensions. Performance is just not an issue at all - one of the advantages why we favor Proxmox VE.” “We definitely can recommend Proxmox VE for its simplicity, its robustness and reliability, its price and the good support (if we have a problem, immediate action is taken). Currently, Proxmox VE runs more stable on our IBM Flex System than the virtualization solution offered by IBM.” - Frank Ihringer What the experts at Serwise really like about Proxmox VE, is the fact that it is extremely stable, easy to install and easy to deploy. There is no need of an additional management server and it’s possible to manage one or several VM hosts in a datacenter cluster via an intuitive GUI. Frank Ihringer CEO, Serwise AG About Serwise AG Founded in 1997, Serwise AG is an IT consulting and service company in the field of data warehousing and business analytics. The company is specialized on IT implementations for medium-sized and big companies. Serwise AG is IBM Cognos TM1 Gold accredited partner and successfully implements IBM software for their customers. This includes dedicated hardware like Netezza in the big data business analytics field. As Microsoft partner, Serwise integrates these IT implementations into existing Microsoft environments. Together with Infra Support AG in Switzerland and Infra Support Germany GmbH in Munich, Serwise forms the Serwise group. The company is headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland. ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2014 17:57:54 +0200</pubDate>
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			<title>KMI Learning</title>
			<link>https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/kmi-learning</link>
			<guid isPermaLink="true">https://proxmox.com/en/about/about-us/stories/story/kmi-learning</guid>
			<description><![CDATA[ "Proxmox Virtual Environment is a fantastic virtualization platform. Over the years we have watched it grow and have grown with it. Starting in 2010 with only two nodes and a handful of virtual machines, we have since grown to 26 nodes and over 150 virtual machines." "The continued development and improvement of the platform has helped to keep us current and on top of new technologies. Proxmox also has one of the best support communities that you will find. The prompt response from members and Proxmox developers makes it easy to find help when you need it." "At KMI Learning we stand behind Proxmox and wholeheartedly recommend it." Eric Blevins System Engineer, KMI Learning ]]></description>
			<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2014 11:18:10 +0200</pubDate>
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