Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER)

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 VE:

Avoiding major investments by reusing current infrastructure

“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. 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. But, soon after testing the product and reviewing the Wiki documentation, we could confirm that it was excellent software and especially supported by a constantly growing community.

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 at Grupo Inversor Veracruzano S.A.P.I. de C.V. (GRIVER)