By transitioning to a hyper-converged Proxmox VE and Ceph architecture, Padua replaced a complex legacy environment with a resilient, qualified infrastructure that improves operational continuity for services used by more than 207,000 residents and supports compliance with Italy’s Three-Year Plan for public-sector IT.

For the Municipality of Padua, IT infrastructure plays an essential role in everyday public service delivery for over 207,000 residents, businesses, and professionals. Supporting critical applications like the digital civil registry, taxation, and urban mobility, infrastructure reliability is not just an IT goal. It directly affects daily operations and public trust.

As part of this modernization effort, the municipality replaced its legacy 2-site setup with a truly hyper-converged architecture based on Proxmox Virtual Environment, Ceph, and Proxmox Backup Server. This transition was driven by Italy’s "3-year plan for Information Technology in Public Administration," which required the consolidation of legacy public-sector data centers and the decommissioning of Padua’s existing infrastructure in favor of qualified data center infrastructure. By integrating compute and storage into a single architecture, the municipality met these regulatory pressures while gaining a more resilient, scalable, and future-ready foundation for its essential administrative services.

The challenge: Legacy complexity and architectural limits

Historically, the infrastructure was distributed across 2 data centers, Sarpi and Gozzi, which were connected through proprietary fiber-optic links. Together, the 2 centers comprised 36 nodes, 912 compute cores, 3.8 terabytes of RAM, and over 350 terabytes of storage. Although the municipality was already using Proxmox Virtual Environment for virtualization, the environment was not yet hyper-converged. It lacked a distributed storage layer for virtual machines and data, and compute and storage were not integrated into a single platform. The existing primary-secondary model provided some redundancy, but it lacked the flexibility, resilience, and operational simplicity needed for a modern long-term infrastructure strategy.
“Our 2 goals were to comply with the 3-year plan by moving to a qualified data center and to evolve toward a hyper-converged architecture that would overcome the limitations of our heterogeneous legacy setup,” said Alberto Corò, Head of the Department of Innovation and Digital Transition.

The solution: A resilient, hyper-converged architecture

To address these requirements, the Municipality of Padua deployed a new infrastructure at the VSIX data center in Padua, a facility qualified in accordance with national guidelines. The municipality collaborated with RACKONE, a Proxmox Gold Partner and Authorized Training Partner.
By combining Proxmox Virtual Environment with Ceph, the municipality integrated compute and storage into one platform. Rather than depending on external SAN systems, storage is now distributed across the cluster itself. This reduces architectural complexity, simplifies operations, and improves resilience through automatic data replication between nodes. For Padua, this marked the transition from a virtualization setup without integrated distributed storage to a truly hyper-converged and future-ready infrastructure.

Hardware and performance: Built to scale

The design also supports future growth. It can be extended across up to 3 distinct sites, provided the necessary latency and bandwidth conditions are met. This creates a path toward geographically distributed scalability scenarios, including a stretched cluster configuration.

The production environment is based on:

• 12 Dell PowerEdge R740XD servers arranged across three logical racks
• Two Intel Xeon Gold 6238R CPUs per node, with 28 cores each
• 768 GB of RAM per node, for a total of 9.2 TB of RAM across the cluster
• Twelve 2.4 TB SAS 10K RPM HDDs and three 960 GB SAS mixed-use SSDs per node
• More than 115 TB of usable storage, replicated with Ceph
• Proxmox Backup Server with more than 400 TB of backup capacity 

The environment is designed to support up to 250 VMs. It also provides an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of zero in the event of a single fault and an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of 24 hours, with the possibility of further reduction for critical services. To ensure performance and isolation, the networks for Ceph, Corosync, backup, and migration are logically separated.
Beyond the main 12-node hyper-converged cluster at the VSIX data center, the Municipality of Padua also operates additional Proxmox VE clusters and several Proxmox Backup Server instances across other sites. This broader setup reflects the overall scale and multi-site nature of the municipality’s infrastructure.

The result: operational continuity, compliance, and scalability

The new architecture delivered 3 strategic benefits:

• First, it improved operational continuity by combining automatic data replication with a platform designed for high availability.
• Second, it helped the municipality align with the 3-year plan and AGID guidelines while retaining direct control over its infrastructure.
• Third, it provided a more scalable foundation for future growth without requiring disruptive reconfiguration.

Beyond migration: a foundation for long-term innovation

The project started with an analysis and design phase in 2021. The implementation and migration to the new hyper-converged platform took place from January to April 2022. From 2022 to 2025, the municipality further strengthened the environment with expanded backup capabilities, container orchestration based on OCI standards, and a CI/CD pipeline management system. In parallel, the municipality invested in internal staff training through Proxmox training courses, helping strengthen operational autonomy over time.
The Municipality of Padua’s project demonstrates how open-source infrastructure can help public-sector organizations modernize critical services while ensuring resilience, compliance, and long-term control. Using Proxmox VE, Ceph, and Proxmox Backup Server, the municipality built a platform where virtualization and distributed storage work together as an integrated system. This approach provides a resilient and scalable foundation for essential digital services.

Flavia Granziero
UOS Data Centre, Department of Innovation and Digital TransitionCompany

About the Municipality of Padua
With over 207,000 residents, the Municipality of Padua is one of the leading administrative centres in the Veneto region in north-eastern Italy. Alongside its important civic role, Padua is known for its ancient origins, its long academic tradition, and its strong commitment to digital innovation and high-quality online public services for citizens, businesses, and professionals.More: https://www.comune.padova.it/

About RACKONE
RACKONE is a Proxmox Gold Partner and Authorized Training Partner specializing in open-source infrastructure solutions. The company supports organizations with the design, implementation, and optimization of modern IT environments, with a focus on virtualization, storage, and operational reliability. More: https://www.rackone.it/