Case study

Enterprise VMware to Proxmox migration at scale

About the client

A global application security and delivery company runs internal lab environments used daily by developers and support engineers. Every customer support case requires its own isolated L2 network environment, making virtualisation infrastructure central to how their teams operate.

Challenge

The client's infrastructure was hitting two compounding limits simultaneously: rising VMware licensing costs that were increasingly difficult to justify, and a VLAN-based network architecture approaching the hard ceiling of the 802.1Q namespace. Scaling further required solving both problems at once, without disrupting the engineering teams depending on these environments every day

Services we provided

Network Infrastructure DesignDevOps
Platform EngineeringNetwork Automation

Solution

CodiLime designed and executed a phased migration from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE 9.x, replacing NFS storage with hyperconverged Ceph and automating deployment with Ansible.

In parallel, we introduced EVPN/VXLAN to expand network capacity from ~4,094 VLANs to approximately 16 million segments. Where Proxmox didn't natively meet the client's requirements, our engineers extended the platform directly by building custom SDN extensions, a kernel netlink-API-based event-driven orchestration, and optimised restart logic that cut full-cluster network reload time from ~45 minutes to under 8.

The project involved the following activities:

Ansible
EVPN
SONiC
Ceph
Proxmox

Evaluation of virtualisation alternatives and architecture design for phased, low-risk migration
Migration of 10,000+ VMs from VMware ESXi to Proxmox VE 9.x with near-zero user-visible disruption
Network redesign using EVPN/VXLAN, GitOps-based automation, and Juniper replacing the existing Arista infrastructure
Platform-level Proxmox engineering to meet enterprise requirements not supported out of the box

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