From SAN bottlenecks to scalable SaaS infrastructure with Proxmox VE and Ceph

Facing rising support costs, aging hardware, and SAN-related storage bottlenecks, Canadian SaaS company UpperBee migrated to Proxmox Virtual Environment. With support from Proxmox partner Images et Technologie, the Montréal-based company built a hyper-converged infrastructure with Proxmox VE and Ceph, reducing vendor dependency and creating a scalable platform for future workloads.

For a SaaS company, infrastructure directly affects how quickly teams can develop, test, and improve the software their customers rely on. For UpperBee, a Montréal-based company specializing in property management software for condominiums and homeowner associations, the existing VMware virtual environment had become increasingly difficult to align with the needs of a modern development organization. Support contract fees were consuming a growing share of the IT budget, while the underlying hardware was reaching the end of its support lifecycle.

At the same time, the legacy SAN architecture could no longer deliver the throughput and responsiveness required by UpperBee’s development teams. This created friction in everyday workflows and made further investment in the existing proprietary ecosystem difficult to justify. UpperBee needed a platform that would reduce cost pressure, remove storage constraints, and give its internal team more control over day-to-day operations.

Choosing Proxmox VE and Ceph

Proxmox Virtual Environment stood out because it combines enterprise virtualization, clustering, high availability, and software-defined storage in one open-source platform. For UpperBee, this meant a more predictable infrastructure strategy without the licensing uncertainty of its previous environment.

A decisive technical factor was the native integration of Ceph. It allowed the project team to design a hyper-converged setup without continuing to rely on a separate SAN. Compute and storage could run on the same hardware, reducing complexity and making future expansion easier. Operational simplicity was also important, as the internal team needed to manage the environment independently after implementation. The web-based management interface helped make that possible while still providing the capabilities required for production workloads.

A validated cluster for customer-led migration

The project was implemented together with Images et Technologie, an authorized Proxmox partner based in Montréal. The partner supported the SaaS company with solution architecture, hardware procurement, full cluster pre-configuration, and technical advisory.

The new environment was built on Dell server hardware, with CPU and memory dimensioned for Ceph workloads. Stacked Aruba 25/100 Gb switches with MLAG provided the network foundation. Dedicated network interfaces were assigned for:

• Corosync – latency-sensitive cluster communication
• Ceph – storage replication
• Frontend traffic – VM- and user-facing traffic

Storage was matched to each workload, a setup Proxmox VE supports natively:

• Ceph was deployed as distributed storage within the hyper-converged environment for general virtual machine workloads.
• ZFS was deployed as the storage layer for the SQL infrastructure, natively available in Proxmox VE either at install time or through the web interface.

Images et Technologie delivered the cluster fully pre-configured and validated, so the internal team could focus on migration rather than the infrastructure build. After the handoff, the company independently managed the move from their VMware solution to Proxmox VE, showing that the new platform was both technically capable and approachable for day-to-day operations.

4x increase in performance

With Proxmox VE UpperBee eliminated its dependency on VMware and gained more control over infrastructure costs and planning. The new Proxmox Virtual Environment and Ceph infrastructure also addressed the SAN-related storage bottlenecks that had limited development workflows. At the same time, the move supported a lower total cost of ownership and more predictable infrastructure planning. The new setup also allows existing hardware to be used more effectively. Legacey hardware can be repurposed for non-production workloads such as build servers, staging environments, or backup targets instead of being retired because of restrictive licensing or compatibility requirements. For UpperBee, the migration created a more flexible infrastructure foundation for its SaaS business.

Cédric Deschamps
CTO & Co-Founder, UpperBee

About UpperBee
UpperBee is a Montréal-based SaaS company specializing in property management software for condominiums and homeowner associations. Its platform enables property managers, boards, and residents across Canada and the United States to manage communications, documents, finances, and operations within a centralized cloud environment. Learn more: https://upperbee.com/

About Images et Technologie
Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Montréal, Québec, Images et Technologie is a Canadian IT solutions provider, systems integrator, and managed service provider. As an official Proxmox partner in Canada, the company helps organizations design, deploy, and operate open-source virtualization environments based on Proxmox Virtual Environment and Ceph. Learn more: https://www.imagespc.com/