The Proxmox VE platform helped the Ethiopian Civil Service University (ECSU) to virtualize the data center of their Development Learning Center. Via the data center they now can provide different web-based applications to offer e-learning services for the university.

"Currently we run a large Drupal-based LMS application for our 17 master programs and 9 bachelor programs which is used by around 5000 students, an intranet for our university teachers, software of research and some other small applications, mostly drupal-based," explains Christian Zange, E-Learning Advisor at ECSU.

"We also serve videos for our students, using a video-streaming-server. Each of our applications is running on a KVM machine with Ubuntu or Debian as operating system."

Standardization and simplified recovery plans

"Our performant IBM-Rackservers have dual CPUs and mostly 128 GB RAM each. It was very important to us to virtualize this environment in order to simplify recovery plans and to provide standardized environments for each application. Our virtual machines are secured automatically on an external backup system. If the main system crashes, the backup is online within no-time. No need to reconfigure a server or an application fiddling with different types of backup files."

Multiple servers for applications, development and staging

"Also, it's possible for us to have one server for each application and a number of development and staging servers for the next version of our e-learning system. We can prepare standardized server-layouts and start new instances with a tip of our fingers."

"No need to install different types of applications with different server requirements on one single machine, or sharing a machine for development, testing and production. This tremendously improves stability of the system as a whole as well as security of our data."

"We were able to achieve all of this ourselves - using the Proxmox VE installation media and online documentation. However, in the future we are planning to get properly trained through the Proxmox team and to implement many of the key features of Proxmox VE, like high availability. We also plan to attach external storage."

Conclusion

"We have been investigating different options, but Proxmox VE was the solution that we found to be the easiest one to use and yet powerful for any needs of a modern data center. No need to install any client software. The web interface provides complete control."

"We have been very surprised how simple it is to virtualize with Proxmox: Installing it on our servers was simply a matter of 30 minutes per machine, including waiting times. It could not have been easier. Our system is running for almost two years now, and there have not been any problems."

"I highly recommend Proxmox VE as a professional, fully-featured and yet affordable solution for server virtualization.”

Christian Zange
E-Learning Advisor, Ethiopian Civil Service University