Why a structured POC
In the public sector, an infrastructure migration decision cannot rest on a commercial benchmark or a vendor demo. It must be grounded in formal, documented, reproducible technical validation.
This public organisation wanted to migrate from VMware. Broadcom had made renewal significantly more expensive. But the technical leadership rightly refused a "go" based on third-party experience reports. They wanted their own evidence, on their own representative workloads, with validation criteria defined upfront.
What a good POC must demonstrate
Before starting, three hours of scoping were used to define what the POC should not do: prove that Proxmox works in a lab. What it had to do: prove that Proxmox works on their workloads, with their network, their storage, their operational constraints.
Validation criteria defined upfront:
- Automatic HA failover in under 8 minutes on representative workloads
- Restore of a critical VM from Proxmox Backup Server in under 10 minutes
- Network isolation between regulated segments maintained identically
- Simultaneous ramp-up of N+2 VMs with no measurable degradation
- Full execution of a rollback procedure by the internal IT team
Structure of the 7 phases
Each phase produced a validated interim technical report before moving to the next.
- Base architecture — Proxmox cluster deployment, initial network configuration, integration into the existing environment
- Network — VLANs, inter-segment routing, regulated traffic inspection
- Storage — ZFS vs Ceph benchmark against identified usage profiles, parameter calibration
- High Availability — failover tests under simulated failure (node, network, power), real RTO measurement
- DRP — full execution of a recovery scenario from backup, RPO/RTO measurement
- Load testing — simultaneous load simulation representative of peak activity
- Operations — execution of routine maintenance procedures by the internal IT team, without external assistance
What the POC struggled to validate
In the interest of honesty: two points required mid-POC adjustments.
Integration with the internal directory service (a regulatory constraint) required an unanticipated technical workaround. The network configuration of one of the regulated segments had a peculiarity documented only in a local configuration file we had not initially identified.
Both points were documented in the final report with the solutions adopted and the residual constraints.
Result
Full validation report delivered to IT management, covering all 7 phases with measured metrics. Target architecture defined, residual constraints documented with their remediation plan. The organisation committed to migration on this basis — with an auditable technical dossier available for any regulatory scrutiny.