Search
en
But, reliability alone isn’t enough. Our customers expect infrastructure that can scale on demand and a team dedicated to making things better, not just fixing what’s broken. Just as important, they expect predictable costs and access to new technologies as soon as they’re available.
As our virtualization platform provider’s cost rose and its technology lagged behind our needs, standing still wasn’t an option. We needed a smarter, more sustainable foundation—one that reduced overhead, simplified management, and freed our engineers to focus on what matters most: helping clients move their businesses forward.
Like many IT teams, Aptum had long relied on VMware as the foundation of our virtual environment.
That changed when Broadcom shifted VMware’s licensing model. Suddenly, renewing meant not only a price increase of over 30%, but also a mandatory three-year commitment. We knew those higher costs and rigidity would slow us down and eventually drive up prices for our clients.
The challenge was clear: find a more affordable and flexible alternative that wouldn’t compromise stability for the businesses that rely on our systems every day.
After reviewing multiple alternatives, Proxmox stood out as the best alternative for us and our clients. But a transition of this scale couldn’t happen overnight. We needed a careful, phased approach that reduced risk and allowed us the chance to build a repeatable playbook for larger workloads ahead.
We started with our own systems, using them as a sandbox to learn the platform and refine our process. Next came applications with built-in redundancy, moving half the servers at a time before switching the rest. By the time we reached critical workloads such as databases and client portals, we had a tested process in hand and a clear path for moving them with confidence.
What started as a cost-cutting project turned into a bigger win: infrastructure that adapts as quickly as our customers’ needs.
Proxmox simplified our work significantly. Performance is steadier, building new clusters takes a fraction of the time, and we finally have a licensing model that’s clear and predictable, with cost savings we can pass on to our clients.
Along the way, our team built a repeatable playbook for large-scale migrations—one we now bring to other businesses facing the same challenges. For our customers, that means we already know what works, where the pitfalls are, and how to move complex environments smoothly and without interruption.
“The difference now is huge: where it used to take us multiple tries to get clusters running, we can now build multiple servers and a whole cluster in less than a day. That speed makes it much easier to keep projects moving without interrupting the business.” – Fred Taylor-Young, IT Operations and Engineering Manager
