Rebuilding a global virtual-events platform's infrastructure on Proxmox and Ceph

Summary

WTV is a global platform provider for virtual events, helping large multinational corporations and government agencies reach audiences right across the world. Founded in the United Kingdom in 1991, the company has spent more than three decades pioneering virtual events and digital communication. Today it runs its own proprietary technology platforms and data centres to serve household names such as Nestle, BP, HSBC, the World Trade Organization and the European Space Agency.

For years, WTV had run its critical workloads on ageing Dell servers virtualised with VMware ESXi. The setup was costly, cumbersome and missing the features a modern events and streaming business depends on. TulipTech was brought in to rebuild the foundations. We migrated WTV onto high-end Huawei hardware, re-platformed the entire estate onto Proxmox Virtual Environment, introduced Ceph storage clustering and re-engineered the network.

The outcome was a high-availability backend infrastructure with live backups, built-in redundancy and far lower running costs. In short, WTV moved from a fragile and expensive server setup to a resilient, scalable and easy-to-manage virtualisation platform.

The challenge

Behind every polished virtual event sits a demanding stack of development, staging and production systems, and for WTV all of it depended on a collection of Dell machines. Most were virtualised on VMware ESXi, while the rest ran on bare metal. On paper it worked. In practice it was holding the business back.

VMware ESXi proved both limiting and cumbersome. Crucially, the existing setup offered no high availability, so a single hardware fault could translate straight into downtime and lost revenue. Advanced features such as VM clustering were simply out of reach. Day-to-day management was just as painful, because every Dell server had to be looked after individually, and centralised monitoring meant paying for an expensive vCenter licence. The hardware itself was underpowered, with low capacity and no headroom for high-bandwidth applications, which created bottlenecks and slowdowns in network traffic.

These weaknesses fed one another. Patching and maintenance became difficult and time-consuming, valuable engineering hours disappeared into routine infrastructure management, and the risk of production downtime stayed stubbornly high. Worst of all, there was no automatic backup and restore, which left business-critical data exposed. It was clear the whole environment needed a serious overhaul, and WTV turned to TulipTech's infrastructure expertise to deliver it.

Our approach

Our first and biggest move was to lift WTV's entire virtualisation framework off VMware and onto Proxmox Virtual Environment. Proxmox VE is an open-source server management platform that offers high availability, virtual machine clustering and centralised management as standard, and at no licensing cost. That single decision addressed a whole cluster of problems at once.

Next, we replaced the tired Dell estate with three high-end Huawei servers. This gave WTV the raw processing power it had been missing, along with plenty of headroom to grow. To get the most from that hardware, we ran clustered storage on Ceph, which keeps data reliable through built-in redundancy. Configured for high availability through Proxmox, the Ceph cluster could ride out hardware failures by live-switching gateways between nodes, and we set up backups across both local and remote storage using NFS.

One challenge stood out. We found high latency between the Ceph storage clusters, caused by network configuration inefficiencies where storage traffic had been routed over internal fibre alone. We solved it completely by installing Huawei gigabit switches and configuring a dedicated VLAN between them, which cleared the storage latency for good. Finally, we advised WTV to take out a Proxmox VE enterprise subscription, an affordable way to receive the latest production-grade patches straight from Proxmox's enterprise repositories.

Key capabilities

The rebuilt platform brought together a set of core capabilities that now underpin WTV's day-to-day operations:

Technology, security and compliance

Proxmox VE for virtualisation and Ceph for distributed storage on Linux, migrated from a Dell and VMware estate, with an ongoing monitoring stack.

See it in action

In their words

Results

The transformation reshaped WTV's server infrastructure into something fast, reliable and genuinely scalable. Running on Proxmox, the three new Huawei servers now handle more than 45 virtual machines powering critical production workloads, all with high availability and redundancy built in. WTV's backend gained real resilience against hardware failures, and the risk of downtime dropped sharply.

Live backups to both onsite and offsite storage reduced data risk still further, while unified monitoring and management through Proxmox made the entire estate quick and easy to maintain. Because the core Proxmox VE platform is free to use, WTV also stripped out significant long-term overhead, turning a costly VMware setup into a lean, cost-effective one. Best of all, the new infrastructure is built to grow, and can be expanded with ease as the business scales.