To manage their hardware and also enable VM migration between two locations which are 300km apart, the Austrain domain registry nic.at opts for the ZFS-based Proxmox VE storage replication.

nic.at GmbH is the official registry for all domains ending in .at, and for the extensions co.at and or.at. The company has its offices in Vienna and Salzburg and both sites operate IT services to achieve geographic independence.

"For a new project, we were looking for a virtualization solution that could manage our hardware at both locations in a single cluster, and also enable VM migration between Vienna and Salzburg. Most virtualization solutions move the migration issue to shared storage. However, there are hardly any affordable storage solutions if the redundant storage sites are 300 km (186 miles) apart. It was also important for us to have a solution where you can detect software errors yourself and fix them if necessary. That's why we preferred an open-source solution."

With the ZFS-based Proxmox VE storage replication framework, we have found a solution that meets our needs. Replication is configurable per VM and is fast, stable and flexible. In total, we now operate 3 Proxmox VE clusters, each of which having one node in Vienna and Salzburg. The sites are redundantly connected via the nic.at backbone with 1Gbit, where the VMs communicate via IPsec encrypted GRE tunnels.

"Various questions at the beginning of our project were answered quickly and competently in the forum and on the mailing lists--even without having a subscription. Nevertheless, we have decided to invest in commercial subscriptions to support the further development of Proxmox VE."

"After these first positive impressions with Proxmox VE we are already planning further applications."

Klaus Darilion
Head of Operations, nic.at