Design
Node sizing, storage choice, networking and redundancy. How many machines you actually need and how they should be built, before the hardware is bought.
Infrastructure
Proxmox VE
We design, deploy and run Proxmox VE clusters in production. We are an official Silver Partner.
What Proxmox VE is
A mature virtualization platform, in development since 2008. It runs virtual machines and containers, and manages whole clusters with shared storage and automatic restart on failure, from a single interface. And it is open source.
The software is free and complete. You pay for a subscription only if you want vendor support and updates validated for production.
- Built on
- Debian GNU/Linux
- Virtualization
- KVM and LXC
- Storage
- Ceph, ZFS, NFS, iSCSI, LVM and others
- Snapshots
- On every storage type, with or without machine memory
- Management
- One web interface for the whole cluster, with no separate management server to install and licence
- Live migration
- Machines move between nodes while running, with no interruption
- Backup
- Built in and schedulable on every storage type. With Proxmox Backup Server it becomes incremental and deduplicated: after the first run only what changed is copied
- Automation
- A REST API covering every function, plus a command line
- Networking
- VLAN, bonding, Open vSwitch, virtual networks (SDN)
- Firewall
- Built in, at cluster, node and machine level
- High availability
- From three nodes up
- Cost
- Free. You pay only for support, if you want it
- Licence
- GNU AGPLv3 — free software
High availability: a node fails, the work carries on
What we do
Deployment
Cluster installation and configuration, distributed storage, backup, firewall, high availability. Handed over working, not half-finished.
Ongoing support
Updates, monitoring, and someone to call when something breaks — a person who knows your infrastructure rather than a support line.
Version upgrades
Moving from an old Proxmox VE release to the current one, even across several versions. Planned, one node at a time, with the option to stop halfway.
Infrastructure recovery
Stalled clusters, upgrades gone wrong, inherited installations with no documentation. We work on systems built by other people too.
Custom development
Components and automation for cases Proxmox VE does not cover out of the box. That is how the cv4pve suite started.
What we work with
The tools we were missing, we wrote
cv4pve is the suite of tools we build for Proxmox VE: automatic snapshots, cluster management, a VDI client, diagnostics, monitoring, and API libraries for five languages. Public since 2016, and running on our clients’ clusters every day.
Coming from VMware?
Have a cluster to design, or one giving you trouble?
We can look at how it stands today and what is worth doing. Even just for an opinion.