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Automation
VMease automated routine administrative tasks into platform workflows, helping apply settings consistently across large numbers of VMs and reducing the burden on the operations team.
Customer story
Customer story : Digital Craftsmen
Digital Craftsmen reduces platform cost, protects service margins and strengthens its regional cloud platform.
Digital Craftsmen is a UK-based specialist in cyber security, managed cloud hosting and cloud services. For more than two decades, the company has helped customers design, host and support infrastructure that fits their specific technical, commercial and operational needs.
Alongside its public cloud expertise, Digital Craftsmen operates its own regional cloud platform from two data centres outside London. This gives customers an alternative to hyperscale public cloud where cost control, sovereignty, service quality or workload suitability make a regional hosted model the better fit.
For Digital Craftsmen, infrastructure is not just a platform. It is part of the craft.
At Digital Craftsmen, we pride ourselves on being craftsmen of the infrastructure, and therefore the choice of software platform is important to us.
The challenge
VMware cost pressure
Digital Craftsmen had built and operated two VMware-based cloud stacks outside London. Technically, those environments worked well. The challenge was commercial.
Following VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom, Digital Craftsmen received notice of significant licensing cost increases. The proposed increase was unacceptable and could not be justified.
The risk was clear: absorb the increase and damage margins, pass higher costs on to customers, or find a credible alternative that could support the same standard of service without creating a new operational burden.
This was not just a procurement issue. Several members of Digital Craftsmen’s close-knit technical team had built careers around VMware technology. Moving away from that ecosystem required confidence that the replacement platform would be stable, supportable and capable of carrying the business forward.
We all wanted to ensure that we made the right choice that set Digital Craftsmen up for the future.
Beyond a hypervisor replacement
Looking beyond a hypervisor replacement
Digital Craftsmen initially made a rapid move to XCP to address the immediate VMware cost challenge. While that helped in the short term, the team encountered constraints around backup management and some VM sizing limits.
The company needed more than another virtualisation layer. It needed a long-term platform for service-provider cloud.
The replacement had to be reliable, commercially sustainable and free from the kind of vendor lock-in that had created the original problem. It also needed to support multi-tenancy, backup, restore validation, replication, disaster recovery and operational automation.
Why VMease
A platform built for service-provider cloud
VMease stood out because it combined proven open-source infrastructure technologies with the control, automation and service-provider capabilities needed to run a commercial cloud platform. Three areas were especially important.
Integrated replication & DR
Many open-source or KVM-based alternatives rely heavily on regular backups and off-site copies. VMease offered a more integrated model, including continuous replication and multiple recovery checkpoints, giving Digital Craftsmen a stronger foundation for future DR services.
Native multi-tenancy
As a hosting provider, Digital Craftsmen needed a platform that could separate customer environments clearly and consistently. VMease provided a tenant-aware operating model designed for managed service and cloud provider environments.
A controlled migration path
A controlled migration path
Around the same time, Digital Craftsmen also needed to refresh some ageing hardware. The company used that opportunity to deploy VMease onto a new environment, allowing the team to become familiar with the platform before migrating production workloads.
The deployment of VMease, including the underlying Proxmox elements, was more straightforward than expected. The installation wizard simplified areas the team had been uncertain about, while VMease provided hands-on support throughout deployment and migration.
The harder part was workload migration. Because Digital Craftsmen hosts customer environments, migrations had to be considered workload by workload and service by service. Some involved external stakeholders or customers, requiring careful planning, testing and validation.
Most systems migrated smoothly. A smaller number required more focused attention, which is normal in any real-world platform migration.
70%lower licensing costcompared with the VMware position Digital Craftsmen was facing
The cost increase we were being presented with was unacceptable, and the VMease platform offered us up to 70% less in pure licensing terms. In addition, we could continue to use some of the same hardware that we were using before.
The results
Lower cost, stronger margins, less manual effort
The most immediate benefit was commercial. Digital Craftsmen estimated VMease offered around 70% lower licensing cost compared with the VMware position it was facing, while continuing to use suitable existing hardware and avoiding unnecessary additional capital expenditure. That combination helped protect the economics of its hosted cloud service and improved platform margin.
More automation and operational consistency
VMease gave Digital Craftsmen integrated capabilities across virtualisation, software networking, virtual firewalls, backup, restore testing and replication. The team could continue designing customer-specific environments while relying on a more consistent platform model underneath.
Automated restore testing
VMease can validate VM restore processes by checking that the guest agent has started and that the operating system has reached user space and booted successfully. This removed a significant manual burden and allowed the team to increase both the quantity and frequency of restore tests.
Faster, safer patching
When a patch becomes available, the cluster becomes aware of it and can schedule non-intrusive patching within predefined change windows. That keeps infrastructure current while reducing manual coordination effort — a benefit from both an operations and security perspective.
Because those tests are automated, that has lifted a tremendous burden from the team and enabled us to increase the quantity and frequency of the restore tests we were doing.
A credible path beyond VMware
A credible path beyond VMware
For Digital Craftsmen, VMease provided a practical way to move beyond VMware cost pressure without stepping down to a manually intensive or unsupported platform model.
The company gained a more commercially sustainable foundation for its hosted cloud business, while adding service-provider multi-tenancy, integrated networking, firewalling, backup validation, patching automation and future disaster recovery capability.
Just as importantly, customers experienced continuity. Some were involved in workload migration planning, but the overall service provided to them did not materially change — a credit to the Digital Craftsmen team and the controlled migration approach.
The biggest lesson was that there really are enterprise-ready, viable VMware alternative options out there. I had always assumed that the only choices were just as expensive. That is not necessarily the case; you just have to find the right partner and the right overall solution.
Take a look at VMease. Have a demo. Do a proof of concept. It’s worth the time investment.
Advice to other providers
Do not assume there are no options
Digital Craftsmen’s advice to other service providers facing VMware cost pressure is clear: do not assume there are no options.
With VMease in place, Digital Craftsmen is now focused on expanding its cloud business and continuing to help customers choose the right cloud solution at the right time and at the right price — whether that is public cloud, regional hosted cloud or a tailored combination of both.
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