Founded in 1997, Serwise AG is a successful IT consulting and service company operating in Switzerland and Germany, and is specialized in data warehousing and big data business analytics. The company’s strategy is to choose open-source software for their internal IT department whenever possible.

Before discovering Proxmox Virtual Environment, Serwise applied VMware as virtualization solution and implemented the software for customers. But as VMware licensing became more and more confusing and the internal open-source strategy forced them to change, the company began to evaluate open-source software solutions like Citrix XenServer and Proxmox VE.

Serwise AG finally decided in favor of Proxmox VE because there is no license required (in contrast to XenServer) and the Serwise IT consultants were really impressed by its simplicity, performance and flexibility. Up to now, the company has never regretted the decision.

A completely virtualized environment with IBM Flex System Enterprise and Proxmox VE

Serwise runs all their services on Proxmox VE today; there are no more natively installed environments: “We virtualize our Microsoft server, our domain infrastructure, and our Exchange server with KVM as well as the time recording and our financial accounting,” explains Frank Ihringer, CEO of Serwise AG.

“On OpenVZ containers we have the complete market platform “schnappundweg.eu” (Java, PostgreSQL, Hibernate, Spring, Wicket, Apache …) with three servers per instance (Dev, Test, Int, Prod). These servers all run on Debian, and by using OpenVZ containers they have an incredibly great performance and an extra slim virtualization layer.”

A new IBM Flex System Enterprise with four nodes has been installed at Serwise since end of 2013. For many years, the company had been using the free community version of Proxmox VE. Today, Proxmox VE (including the subscription service) is running on three nodes with a total of six processors in a datacenter. Until June 2014 there are likely to be three more nodes with six processors to be added. All applications are being transferred to the new infrastructure at the moment.

For Serwise, the benefits are obvious: “Proxmox VE reveals real sensational performance and comfort values in a BladeCenter/SAN environment (IBM/EMC),” says Frank Ihringer.

Conclusion

“The performance of Proxmox VE is simple to explain: it’s the same like the hardware below. Or to say it in other words: We have never noticed any degradation – not even with big data bases in data warehouse environments or with very big in-memory OLAP data bases like IBM Cognos TM1 with huge dimensions. Performance is just not an issue at all - one of the advantages why we favor Proxmox VE.”

“We definitely can recommend Proxmox VE for its simplicity, its robustness and reliability, its price and the good support (if we have a problem, immediate action is taken). Currently, Proxmox VE runs more stable on our IBM Flex System than the virtualization solution offered by IBM.” - Frank Ihringer

What the experts at Serwise really like about Proxmox VE, is the fact that it is extremely stable, easy to install and easy to deploy. There is no need of an additional management server and it’s possible to manage one or several VM hosts in a datacenter cluster via an intuitive GUI.

Frank Ihringer
CEO, Serwise AG

About Serwise AG
Founded in 1997, Serwise AG is an IT consulting and service company in the field of data warehousing and business analytics. The company is specialized on IT implementations for medium-sized and big companies. Serwise AG is IBM Cognos TM1 Gold accredited partner and successfully implements IBM software for their customers. This includes dedicated hardware like Netezza in the big data business analytics field. As Microsoft partner, Serwise integrates these IT implementations into existing Microsoft environments. Together with Infra Support AG in Switzerland and Infra Support Germany GmbH in Munich, Serwise forms the Serwise group. The company is headquartered in Winterthur, Switzerland.