Two sites, one ecosystem: Chitale Group builds on Proxmox
Indian dairy and food manufacturer Chitale Group wanted more control over its virtualization infrastructure, storage architecture, and operating costs. After 20 years with VMware, the company moved its production and disaster recovery environments to Proxmox Virtual Environment.
Founded in 1939, Chitale Group produces and distributes dairy products and sweets across India. The company employs around 1,600 people and has digitized processes throughout its operations, from milk procurement and production to distribution.
VMware formed the foundation of Chitale Group’s virtual infrastructure. Before the migration, the production data center ran ESXi with vSAN on 4 Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers, while the disaster recovery site used ESXi on Dell PowerEdge blades. Kubernetes workloads ran on Tanzu.
Over time, this setup created several challenges. Changes to VMware licensing made costs harder to predict, while the existing vSAN architecture limited storage flexibility. Backup, disaster recovery, virtualization, and Kubernetes also relied on separate products and technologies.
For the small infrastructure team, this growing complexity became increasingly difficult to justify. Chitale Group wanted predictable costs, greater hardware and storage flexibility, and simpler day-to-day operations.
Freedom to choose storage
After evaluating different alternatives, Chitale Group selected Proxmox VE as the foundation for its new infrastructure. A key factor was the ability to use different storage technologies according to the requirements of each site, rather than forcing both environments into the same architecture.
The production data center runs a 4-node Proxmox VE cluster on Cisco UCS servers. NetApp ONTAP storage connects over Fibre Channel and provides shared LVM storage for production workloads, while NFS is used for ISO images.
At the disaster recovery site, another 4-node cluster runs on Dell PowerEdge R740xd servers. Here, Chitale Group uses Ceph with separate NVMe and HDD pools, complemented by shared storage over NVMe-TCP. This allows the company to run different storage architectures on the same virtualization platform.
Starting with disaster recovery site
Chitale Group planned the migration during the first half of 2026 and completed the production migration in Q3. Rather than starting with the main data center, the company rebuilt the disaster recovery environment first. This allowed the team to test storage design, backups, networking, and Kubernetes before applying the experience to production.
For most virtual machines, Chitale Group used the integrated ESXi import functionality in Proxmox VE. The team then configured the new production cluster on Cisco UCS and NetApp storage, with dedicated networks for management, cluster communication, migration, and virtual machine traffic.
The entire design and migration took place in-house without an external integrator. According to Chitale Group, one administrator handled the assessment, architecture, migration, virtualization, storage, and Kubernetes environment. Proxmox Partner TechnoInfotech supplies the company with Proxmox subscriptions.
Proxmox Backup Server runs at both locations and supports the disaster recovery strategy between the 2 data centers.
For a central view of both independent Proxmox VE clusters Proxmox Datacenter Manager is used, also supporting cross-cluster-migrations. Together, the Proxmox solutions give Chitale Group an integrated approach to virtualization, backup, and multi-cluster management.
Kubernetes without a proprietary layer
Kubernetes was another important part of the new infrastructure. Instead of continuing with Tanzu, Chitale Group built a new Kubernetes environment using Cluster API with CAPMOX and Argo CD. Production, UAT, QA, and development environments now run on the Proxmox infrastructure, with UAT providing a controlled stage for lifecycle changes before they reach production. This gives the team a GitOps-driven approach to Kubernetes while keeping the underlying infrastructure under its own control.
More control, less complexity
For Chitale Group, the migration did more than replace the hypervisor. The company can now choose hardware and storage according to technical requirements rather than adapting its infrastructure to a single vendor model.
It also reports lower database latency on its NVMe Ceph pool and Fibre Channel shared storage compared with the previous hybrid vSAN environment. At the same time, Chitale Group has reduced its dependence on proprietary infrastructure components. Virtualization, storage, backup, and Kubernetes now rely largely on established open-source technologies. Adding new capacity is now primarily a technical and hardware decision rather than another licensing negotiation.
For a company our size, the decisive advantage of Proxmox VE is the ability to manage virtualization, storage, backup, and Kubernetes ourselves. That is what made moving away from VMware after 20 years realistic for us.Vishvas Chitale, Director and CTO, Chitale Group
Built on in-house expertise
Transparency remains an important part of the new environment. The internal team can inspect configurations and logs and work directly with the underlying technologies, while documentation and standardized open-source technologies support day-to-day operations. Proxmox VE is now Chitale Group’s standard virtualization platform.
For IT strategy, Proxmox VE moved us from buying a stack to owning one. New capacity is now a hardware decision, not a licensing negotiation, and the skills we built are transferable open-source skills (KVM, Ceph, LVM, Debian, Kubernetes) rather than vendor certifications.Vishvas Chitale, Director and CTO, Chitale Group
Vishvas Chitale Direktor und CTO, Chitale Group
About Chitale Group Founded in 1939 and headquartered in Bhilawadi, Maharashtra, India, Chitale Group is a dairy and food manufacturer with around 1,600 employees. The company’s operations span milk procurement, processing, production, and distribution, with a broad portfolio of dairy products and sweets. More about: https://chitaledairy.com/
About Proxmox Partner TechnoInfotech Established in 2002, TechnoInfotech provides specialized Linux and open-source infrastructure solutions to organizations throughout India. As an authorized Proxmox reseller since 2018, TechnoInfotech is instrumental in delivering virtualization and software-defined storage clusters using Proxmox VE. Today, TechnoInfotech serves as a key strategic partner for its customers, supporting their ongoing infrastructure needs. More about: https://technoinfotech.com/
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