Most small offices still run one aging server in a closet: a file share, an accounting app, maybe a domain controller, all on a single machine with a single point of failure. Proxmox for small business is how we’d replace that box today. It’s what Rainier IT runs on, and it gives a small office the same tools the big shops use without the big licensing bill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Proxmox Virtual Environment<\/a> turns one or more physical servers into a pool that runs many smaller machines. It combines two kinds:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everything is managed from a web page. Several servers can join a cluster, and with high availability a machine on a failed server restarts on a healthy one. Storage can be local disks with ZFS, which checks your data for silent corruption, or Ceph spread across servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s open source under the GNU AGPL<\/a>, so there is no per-core license to buy. A paid subscription adds the vendor’s enterprise update channel and support, and for a business we recommend one. The free channel is meant for testing, not production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Its partner, Proxmox Backup Server<\/a>, makes incremental, deduplicated backups of every machine, with encryption and integrity checks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We don’t sell anything we don’t run ourselves. Our own infrastructure is a cluster of Proxmox VE 9.2 servers, and almost everything you touch when you work with us lives on it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Backups also make testing safe. Before we upgrade our remote management server, we restore last night’s backup into a separate staging copy and upgrade that first. If something breaks, it breaks there, not in production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of it is managed by hand. Ansible playbooks in Git describe how each server should look, and Jenkins runs them<\/a> on a schedule to patch, check certificates and confirm every host is healthy. Prometheus and Grafana<\/a> watch it all and alert us when something drifts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here’s where it makes sense for a small office:<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not the right fit for everyone. If your apps already live in Microsoft 365 and nothing runs in the office, you may not need a server at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On-site servers are fast and private, but one building is still one building. That’s why we pair Proxmox with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our AWS environment is built the same way as everything else here: in code, with Terraform. It has separate accounts for management and production, single sign-on, organization-wide audit logging and threat detection, and a private network spread across three availability zones in Oregon, ready to carry standby workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re building on that foundation now. Next are off-site copies of our Proxmox backups in AWS storage that locks each copy against changes or deletion for a set period, so ransomware can’t reach them. After that comes warm-standby hosting that can take over websites and key services if the office goes dark. The same pattern scales down for a small business: local servers for daily work, an AWS copy for the bad day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the work we do for small businesses around Pierce County:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’d like a second set of eyes on your setup, book our free 30-minute assessment<\/a>. We’ll tell you whether Proxmox, the cloud or a mix fits your office best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
How we run Proxmox at Rainier IT<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Where Proxmox for small business fits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Cloud redundancy and failover on AWS<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What we build: infrastructure, code and the web<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What to do this week<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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