Open Source Osijek

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