Migration from VMware to Proxmox VE is no longer just a laboratory or IT department conversation about cheaper alternatives. It is increasingly demonstrating real benefits in industrial companies, where the impact is measured in process times, operational continuity, and room to grow. One example presented by Proxmox involves Artec Srl, an Italian manufacturer specializing in pneumatic cylinders for industrial automation, which reports a 40% improvement in the performance of its key workloads after replacing its previous environment with a hyperconverged infrastructure based on Proxmox VE.
The case is noteworthy because it does not focus on a tech startup or a digital-native company, but on an industry where IT must serve production, not the other way around. At Artec, any bottleneck in planning, quality control, or maintenance can end up affecting factory pace. Therefore, beyond license savings, the company sought a platform that offered stability, management simplicity, and scalability without adding operational friction.
An outdated VMware environment
According to the case published by Proxmox, Artec faced several issues with its VMware-based environment. On one hand, licensing costs strained the budget. On the other, performance did not meet the needs of a company that depends on predictable process times for planning production and ensuring quality. Additionally, there was a sense of technical rigidity: any change was slower than desired, and maintenance windows added risks during critical moments.
This context explains why the company decided to rethink its infrastructure. It wasn’t just about switching hypervisors for ideological reasons or following market trends. The goal was more practical: simplify operations, reduce dependence on a perceived costly and rigid stack, and free the IT team for higher-value tasks. Artec’s management sums it up as transparency, control, and scalability—three recurring themes in migration projects from closed to more open environments.
Founded in 1982 in Cento, in Italy’s Ferrara province, Artec designs and manufactures pneumatic cylinders for industrial automation. This profile helps explain why its IT infrastructure cannot afford to fail easily. It’s not a company where system slowdowns can happen without real consequences. When production and quality depend on critical applications, improvements in latency, stability, or maintenance ease have a direct impact on daily operations.
Three nodes, native Ceph, and all-flash storage
The migration was led by MegaByte Sistemi Informatici, a Proxmox partner also based in Cento. The project was structured in multiple phases: analyzing the existing environment, designing the new cluster, scheduled migration during low-activity periods, validation afterward, and internal training to operate the new platform smoothly.
The architecture features a three-node cluster with native Ceph storage, an approach aimed at simplifying high availability and scaling compute and storage together. The technical design includes enterprise servers with dual processors and redundant power supplies, all-flash NVMe storage for low latency and consistent performance, a 100 GbE network for Ceph replication, 25 GbE for cluster traffic, and 10 GbE for user data.
This detail is significant because it explains that the 40% performance gain can’t be attributed solely to software changes. In such a migration, the outcome depends on the entire setup: new architecture, flash storage, network design, native integration of virtualization and distributed storage, and a carefully managed deployment process. Labeling it as an automatic victory of one product over another would be overly simplistic. Instead, this case shows that a more coherent infrastructure aligned with business needs can unlock very tangible improvements.
Less impact on production, more room to grow
The key takeaway is the 40% reduction in process times for critical workloads. Proxmox highlights this as one of the main achievements, alongside an especially important benefit for an industrial company: maintenance no longer disrupts production. In a manufacturing environment, this difference is far more valuable than what technical specs alone suggest. Being able to update the platform without halting operations reduces operational risk and provides flexibility to keep the infrastructure up-to-date without conflicting with the production schedule.
Additionally, VMware licensing costs have been eliminated, freeing up budget for innovation. This should be viewed carefully: the actual savings depend on each environment, support agreements, hardware, internal training, and the time required for migration. Nevertheless, it’s clear that, in this case, moving to Proxmox VE has been perceived as both a way to reduce financial and operational overhead.
The company itself emphasizes now having a “reliable, efficient, and future-ready” solution—common language in such testimonials but supported here by specific technical choices: network and storage redundancy from the start, native Ceph integration, a regular update schedule, and internal staff training to avoid dependence on external providers for basic operations.
A case reflecting a broader trend
While Proxmox promotes this project as a success story, its broader value extends beyond marketing. It mirrors a growing trend among medium-sized and industrial companies: seeking virtualization platforms that are more predictable in cost, more open, and easier to tailor to specific needs. Not all migrations will yield a 40% performance increase, nor start from the same point, but they share a common concern: virtualization is no longer chosen solely by tradition or inertia, but by genuine alignment with business goals.
In Artec’s case, that alignment appears to have been the key. The company wasn’t after a more complex or radically transformed infrastructure; it wanted speed, stability, and simplicity. And, based on the publicly available information from Proxmox and the technical details of the project, it seems that’s what they found with their new hyperconverged cluster.
The main lesson from this case isn’t that Proxmox is a universal solution, but that a well-designed architecture, performance measurement, disciplined migration planning, and team training can turn IT infrastructure from a bottleneck into a real lever for improvement. In a factory, such benefits become visible much faster than in a marketing presentation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What has Artec achieved by migrating from VMware to Proxmox VE?
According to Proxmox’s case study, the Italian company improved performance of critical workloads by 40%, eliminated VMware licensing costs, and can perform maintenance without halting production.
What architecture does Artec now use with Proxmox VE?
A three-node cluster with native Ceph storage, all-flash NVMe drives, a 100 GbE network for Ceph replication, 25 GbE for cluster traffic, and 10 GbE for user data.
Who carried out the Proxmox deployment at Artec?
The migration was supported by MegaByte Sistemi Informatici, a Proxmox partner and IT provider based in Cento, Ferrara.
What does Artec do, and why was infrastructure improvement important?
Artec is an Italian manufacturer of pneumatic cylinders for industrial automation. Fast and stable IT systems directly influence planning, quality control, and operational continuity in production.
via: proxmox