Laut und Schoen is an agency for marketing and design based in the German city of Frankfurt. The interdisciplinary team of specialists offers strategic consulting and the creative and technical implementation in all media areas. 

Within the scope of a service offered in communication and IT-consulting, Laut und Schoen replaced a Windows Small Business Server for one of their customers lacking an own IT department. The job also included the integration of external staff via VPN.

After years of uncontrolled growth the customer’s IT environment had turned into chaos: Over the years every single external software supplier had installed their proper hardware and operating systems, which would fit their products. The purpose of the customer was to eliminate this chaos.

Organizing IT chaos after years of uncontrolled growth

First, a small business setup of three physical servers was replaced with Proxmox VE. The VMs (OpenVZ and KVM) now running are an Ubuntu Server for Zarafa (as replacement for Microsoft Exchange), and an OpenVPN appliance. A proprietary business application served as terminal server sessions on an old SuSE 9.3. Then there was another single PC for a work-time-logging system, which was virtualized too.

“As final result, the implementation of Proxmox VE helped us to cut down the electricity bill significantly by reducing the power consumption of two servers and one PC. Our customer is now able to run old applications and operating systems on modern hardware.” Norbert Micheel

On top, one of the servers had an old, expensive hardware maintenance contract which could be cancelled within the new setup.

Time-saving approach with Proxmox VE

“To me, as an IT manager who is constantly lacking time, it was fast and easy to immerse myself in Proxmox VE because it offers a far more time-saving approach than other compared systems."

"For our rather small customers, Proxmox is definitely appropriate and offers the big advantage that it is scalable in the future. At the moment the implemented virtual environment is stable and has not seen any problems.”

Norbert Micheel
Head of IT, Laut und Schoen