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The University of Dhaka, one of Bangladesh’s largest public universities, relies on always-on digital services to keep campus operations running smoothly. But rising licensing costs and limited resilience in its legacy environment forced a rethink.
At the University of Dhaka, IT is an integral part of campus life. With tens of thousands of students handling time-sensitive tasks online and staff supporting essential operations behind the scenes, systems must respond instantly. Any downtime can quickly become a campus-wide disruption.
For years, the university ran critical workloads across a mix of virtualization platforms. The technology worked, but the trade-offs kept getting worse. Licensing costs increased, upgrades became more restrictive, and achieving true high availability remained difficult.
When upgrades came with strings attached
The university operated VMware ESXi, but the licensing model became unsustainable. “The licensing fees often cost more than the server hardware itself,” said Md. Mahedi Hasan, Senior Cybersecurity Analyst and former Network Engineer at the University of Dhaka. The team also used XenServer, but the free edition restricted clustering. This limitation had a direct consequence: no high availability (HA). If a physical host failed, the services running on it failed too. For the university’s most critical services, that risk was no longer acceptable.
Upgrades were another pressure point. Newer hypervisor versions were tied to expensive paid tiers, which effectively trapped the environment on older releases. The result was a familiar public-sector dilemma: spend the budget on licenses, or accept growing technical debt and operational risk.
Core enterprise-features without license fees
As a public university that values open-source technology, the University of Dhaka wanted an enterprise-grade platform without artificial feature barriers. Proxmox Virtual Environment stood out because all features are available in the open-source platform, not reserved for higher-priced editions. “We were impressed that core enterprise-features like clustering, HA, and backups are not locked behind a paywall,” said Hasan.
The platform also offered a clear architectural direction. Proxmox VE enabled the university to move toward a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) by using integrated Ceph storage to scale capacity horizontally on standard hardware. With Proxmox Backup Server, backup and recovery could be built into daily operations instead of being treated as an afterthought.
From pilot to production
The university implemented a test-first strategy. First, the team ran a pilot project to validate cluster behavior, management workflows, and stability under real workload patterns. Only after proving the environment’s viability did they move mission-critical services.
They began production with a 5-node cluster and migrated the most important applications from VMware and XenServer. Hasan led the initiative, ensuring each workload migrated cleanly and predictably.
Today, most of the university’s core applications run on Proxmox VE, and the cluster serves as the default platform for new deployments.
Designing for speed and resilience
The gains were amplified by a hardware refresh and disciplined design. The university upgraded its storage from SAS to SSDs and introduced a redundant 10 Gbps network backbone. This combination significantly improved the performance of I/O-intensive workloads and reduced latency across busy systems.
The team also implemented best practices that paid off immediately.
- Network segmentation: They separated public and management traffic from cluster and Ceph traffic to improve security and performance.
- Storage strategy: The university currently uses both Ceph and SAN but has decided not to expand its SAN footprint. Future growth will focus on Ceph, allowing storage to scale out with standard servers.
- Disaster recovery by design: Proxmox Backup Server was deployed with remote site replication. Backups are stored locally for quick restoration and are replicated offsite to protect against localized failures. Together, these decisions created a modern virtualization stack that is fast in day-to-day use and resilient when the unexpected happens.
Stability becomes the norm
The most visible result is reliability. By moving to a clustered, highly available platform, the University of Dhaka achieved 99.99% uptime for critical services. This translates to fewer disruptions during peak periods, less emergency troubleshooting, and a better experience for students and staff.
Data protection has also improved substantially. Proxmox Backup Server and offsite replication strengthened business continuity, making recovery faster and more predictable.
Cost efficiency was a major win as well. Eliminating proprietary licensing fees freed up budget to invest in infrastructure improvements that directly benefit performance and resilience, including SSDs and redundant 10Gbps networking. In effect, the university shifted spending from licenses to lasting capability.
Strategically, Proxmox VE enabled the university to move toward a software-defined future. The university is no longer tied to vendor-driven storage hardware cycles or upgrade constraints that hinder modernization. Scaling can happen whenever the campus needs it, using the hardware the team chooses.
A new standard for the digital campus
Proxmox solutions are now the standard infrastructure at the university. The team plans to expand the cluster with additional compute and storage nodes to support the growing digital demands of a campus community of more than 45,000 students.
With Proxmox VE as the foundation, the University of Dhaka has built an environment that reflects its values and reality: open, scalable, and independable. As Hasan put it, “We can finally invest in better infrastructure instead of paying for licenses, and the whole university benefits.”
Md Mahedi Hasan
Senior Cybersecurity Analyst
About University of Dhaka
Founded in 1921 and headquartered in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the University of Dhaka is the country’s oldest active university and one of its most influential public institutions for higher education and research. It serves a community of around 45,000 students, supported by approximately 2,200 faculty and 3,900 staff, and plays a central role in advancing academic excellence and public-sector innovation across Bangladesh.