Pertamina Geothermal Energy builds a resilient digital foundation with Proxmox VE
To support the reliable operation of its geothermal facilities, Pertamina Geothermal Energy required an infrastructure foundation that could connect its distributed sites, protect critical workloads and scale to meet new demands. By standardizing on Proxmox ecosystem, the company created a resilient digital platform across 7 locations.
Pertamina Geothermal Energy (PGE) is an Indonesian geothermal energy company headquartered in Jakarta. Its IT infrastructure supports corporate applications and mission-critical operational systems for power generation, including plant monitoring, geothermal drilling, security platforms, data analytics, and AI initiatives.
As PGE's digitalization activities expanded, its legacy mix of Microsoft Hyper-V and cloud-hosted servers became increasingly difficult to scale and manage. The company therefore set out to build a standardized on-premises platform for its Head Office and 6 geothermal field sites.
The Challenge: Rising complexity and cloud costs
PGE faced rising licensing and maintenance costs in its previous virtualization environment. Cloud costs, including data egress fees, were becoming difficult to justify. In addition, most operational data needed to remain within the company network.
Managing infrastructure across several geographically distributed locations added complexity. Clusters and storage resources at the Head Office and field sites had to be monitored and maintained individually, making consistent configurations and capacity planning more difficult. PGE required a flexible platform capable of supporting both critical operational systems and modern, future-proof workloads. Reliability and high availability were key requirements.
Building a Unified, Open-Architecture Foundation
Following an evaluation of several options, PGE selected the Proxmox ecosystem to anchor its next-generation infrastructure: Proxmox Virtual Environment as its primary virtualization platform, Proxmox Backup Server for robust backup and recovery purposes, and Proxmox Datacenter Manager for centralized, cross-cluster management. Native Ceph support was an important factor. This allowed PGE to hyperconverge compute and distributed storage within the same Proxmox Virtual Environment infrastructure, eliminating the need for a separate storage management layer. Built-in clustering and high availability features support the resilient operation of critical systems.
Proxmox Backup Server provided incremental backups and efficient storage utilization, and the open architecture helped PGE to reduce its dependence on proprietary licensing and cloud infrastructure.
The Proxmox ecosystem have now become the infrastructure standard at Pertamina Geothermal Energy. For us, this is not just about replacing an old platform. It is about building a foundation that is better prepared for the digitalization ahead. In the geothermal industry, reliability is non-negotiable. And so far, the Proxmox solutions have proven capable of meeting that demand.Mahmuddin Noor Nasution, Analyst IT Core & Infrastructure, PT Pertamina Geothermal Energy
Implementation and Technical Architecture
PGE completed the core migration in approximately 6 months. The project began with architecture design and deployment at the Head Office, followed by a staged migration from Microsoft Hyper-V and cloud servers - moving non-critical systems first before transitioning business-critical workloads. Today, PGE's Proxmox infrastructure includes:
Distributed Footprint: 7 locations consisting of the Head Office and 6 operational field sites.
Compute Power: 29 Proxmox VE nodes supporting 155 active VMs and containers (with a baseline of 119 running continuously at the Head Office, scaling up to 135 during peak demands).
Hyperconverged & Shared Storage: Ceph runs directly on the Proxmox VE nodes for hyperconverged storage. This is supplemented by iSCSI SAN storage, utilizing an SSD/hybrid tier for production workloads and a dedicated HDD tier for backups.
Multi-Tiered Backup: Five virtual Proxmox Backup Server instances distributed across two local SAN datastores, paired with an additional physical PBS deployed at a geographically separate location for disaster recovery.
PGE's internal infrastructure team led the project with support from PT Kreasi Utama Mandiri, an official Proxmox partner in Indonesia. The partner assisted with subscription procurement, early architecture consultation, and selected parts of the implementation. By deliberately building internal expertise throughout the project, PGE can now manage the day-to-day operation of the environment independently.
The Results: Driving the Digitalization Roadmap
PGE has successfully migrated around 50 workloads from legacy environments, while provisioning more than 100 new VMs directly within Proxmox VE. The migration was completed without significant incidents, and PGE plans to move further cloud workloads on-premises until the end of the year. By reducing its reliance on cloud-hosted infrastructure and avoiding recurring proprietary virtualization licensing fees, PGE achieved substantial cost efficiencies that supported further growth across its locations.
The standardized environment has dramatically simplified day-to-day operations. The IT team can deploy VMs, expand Kubernetes workloads, manage storage, and monitor the distributed infrastructure with unprecedented efficiency. Consistent node configurations have made upgrades, troubleshooting, and capacity planning easier.
The entire infrastructure now supports both critical systems for geothermal power generation and modern workloads such as Kubernetes, security monitoring, data analytics, and AI. High availability is implemented at the VM and application level for critical systems. Most importantly, Proxmox VE has become PGE's official infrastructure standard and a central part of its digitalization roadmap.
Preparing for the Next Phase
PGE intends to migrate its remaining cloud workloads to on-premises infrastructure and deploy additional edge computing nodes based on Proxmox Virtual Environment at new geothermal sites. The company also intends to use the platform for AI-based predictive maintenance and to further expand its Kubernetes-based, cloud-native infrastructure.
Mahmuddin Noor Nasution Analyst IT Core & Infrastructure, PT Pertamina Geothermal Energy
About PT Pertamina Geothermal Energy Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Jakarta, PT Pertamina Geothermal Energy focuses on geothermal power generation. The company operates geothermal assets across Indonesia and continues to develop its digital infrastructure to support reliable, efficient, and sustainable energy production. More: https://pge.pertamina.com
About PT Kreasi Utama Mandiri PGE worked with PT Kreasi Utama Mandiri, an official Proxmox partner in Indonesia. The partner supported subscription procurement, provided architecture consultation during the early stages, and assisted with parts of the implementation. Daily operation of the environment is now handled entirely by PGE's internal IT team. More: https://www.kum.co.id/v2/
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