Decoupling storage from virtualization: How Loughborough University migrated 500 VMs
Tasked with a strict budget reduction, Loughborough University faced a sudden price hike for its legacy virtualization platform. To regain control, they migrated 500 VMs to Proxmox VE across 3 data centers, maintaining high availability and securing predictable costs.
Loughborough University is a premier UK research institution based in the county of Leicestershire. Its IT division manages core academic and operational infrastructure across 3 data centers, supporting everything from high-performance computing to campus life safety systems.
Trapped by a vendor pricing spike
Loughborough’s IT infrastructure relied on a legacy VMware setup. This environment spanned 3 data centers on Cisco UCS hardware, encompassing a 16-node production stretch cluster, a 4-node backup cluster, and a 4-node development cluster.
At renewal, the university faced a significant price increase on their 64-socket physical CPU licensing model, which historically cost ~£35,000 annually. This threatened core IT budgets already under pressure from constrained campus-wide spending, leaving mission-critical infrastructure exposed to single-vendor pricing controls.
The IT team needed to replace the hypervisor without forcing a premature hardware refresh or abandoning their existing NetApp NFS storage architecture. They required a platform capable of maintaining High Availability (HA) across sites prior to a strict internal August change freeze.
Decoupling hypervisor from storage
Loughborough adopted Proxmox Virtual Environment as a strategic infrastructure platform. The IT team already had working familiarity with Proxmox Virtual Environment, running it inside their HPC cluster and utilizing it for a Computer Science cybersecurity course.
By retaining their NetApp NFS storage and snapVault backups, the team decoupled the hypervisor transition from the storage architecture. To validate this setup, Loughborough partnered with Novatech, a Proxmox Gold Partner, ensuring secure network topology configuration before deployment.
The final Proxmox Virtual Environment estate matched the legacy scale precisely, distributed across 3 distinct clusters:
cluster-prod-01 (primary production): 16 hosts stretched across 2 data centers, running ~475 core VMs that underpin all University operations, from facilities management, to student teaching and assessment.
cluster-prod-02 (secondary production): 4 hosts in a tertiary data center, hosting 25 critical replica VMs (domain controller, DNS, DHCP, Radius) and a Proxmox Virtual Environment QDevice to maintain quorum.
cluster-dev-01 (development): 4 hosts for firmware updates and patch testing.
If we had known the value that Novatech would add to this project, we would have engaged earlier. Their expertise has saved Loughborough University a good few months in architecture, design and providing best practice – they also stopped us from pursuing dead ends which can happen in complex projects such as this.Mark Newall, Senior IT Services Specialist, Loughborough University
A zero-data-loss migration path
To free up hardware for the new environment, the IT team rationalized their legacy setup, shrinking the 16-node cluster to 10 nodes and the 4-node cluster to 2.
The rollout was automated using custom PowerShell scripts and an internal PHP frontend. Migration was explicitly de-risked by running each VM on its original VMDK disks in Proxmox Virtual Environment first. Once proven stable, the disks were converted to native QCOW2 format. If a VM failed to boot, it was simply shut down in Proxmox Virtual Environment and restarted in the legacy hypervisor with zero data loss.
Measurable Outcomes
Cost reduction: Replaced a multi-year VMware support contract, tied to physical CPU socket licensing, with an annual Proxmox Virtual Environment Standard support agreement scaled to the university's actual server count, delivering a meaningful reduction against the historical baseline.
Deployment scale: Migrated ~500 VMs across the 3 clusters by September 2026.
Migration speed: Executed VM transfers in under 10 minutes per VM (on average).
Linux downtime: Maintained migration downtime at under 1 minute for Linux VMs.
Windows downtime: Windows VMs took about 7 minutes end-to-end across 3 reboots; a small number of hardware-tied license servers needed vendor reactivation, extending downtime to 1 to 2 hours in those cases.
What’s Next
The IT team migrated 500 VMs while working with constrained budgets, completing the transition in rapid timescales with no disruption to end users. The successful multi-site deployment establishes a flexible, open-source foundation for Loughborough University, paving the way for continued collaboration with Novatech and Proxmox Virtual Environment ahead of their next physical infrastructure refresh in 2028.
Mark Newall Senior IT Services Specialist, Loughborough University
About Loughborough University Loughborough is a leading UK research university, known for strong industry links, high-quality teaching, and world-leading research, with over 90% of its research rated world-leading or internationally excellent (REF 2021). Its Leicestershire campus supports a broad academic and research community, with a strong international reputation for sport-related disciplines. Learn more: https://www.lboro.ac.uk/
About Proxmox Partner Novatech Founded in 1987, Novatech is a multi-specialist IT partner delivering secure, flexible, and fully managed technology environments for organizations across the UK and internationally. Combining deep in-house engineering with a transparent, pay-as-you-use model and no vendor lock-in, Novatech is trusted by progressive organizations including Octopus Energy, Monzo, University of Oxford, and Loughborough University. Learn more: www.novatech.co.uk/business/proxmox
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