Talks
On this page you’ll find a curated list of my technical talks and conference sessions. Topics range from Proxmox VE clustering, live migration safety,
BSD virtualization, to open-source infrastructure tooling. Each talk includes slides and, where available, a full video recording.
BoxyBSD - Why Switching the virtualization hypervisor?
credativ GmbH OSS Virtualization Gathering
Mönchengladbach, Germany – December 2025
In this talk, I explain why I moved the BoxyBSD platform from bhyve to KVM with Proxmox VE and what I learned along the way.
Running a VPS platform comes with very concrete requirements. Everything must be fully automatable, work on standard x86_64 hardware, support robust ZFS based storage, offer clustering and high availability, and allow live migrations without customer downtime. Long term maintainability is just as important as raw performance.
bhyve is a fast, secure and elegant hypervisor that fits perfectly into the FreeBSD ecosystem. It is easy to maintain and works great for smaller or tightly controlled setups. However, once the platform started to grow, missing pieces became more visible. There was no mature orchestrator with a strong API, no real clustering and no live migration support. These limitations made scaling the platform increasingly difficult.
KVM combined with Proxmox VE provided a much stronger foundation. A rich API, built in clustering, live migration and solid storage integration made it possible to operate and scale the platform in a more reliable and automated way. Other solutions were evaluated as well, but issues around hardware flexibility, driver support or automation ruled them out.
The switch itself was not the end of the journey. Proxmox also has gaps, such as missing or incomplete Ansible modules, no real distributed resource scheduler, no native micro segmentation and challenges with multi master and multi region setups. Instead of working around these silently, I turned many of these problems into open source projects like ProxLB, ProxWall, custom Ansible modules and even a fully self built VPS self service portal.
This talk is a hands on report from real production use, focusing on trade offs, hard requirements and practical lessons learned when choosing and operating a hypervisor platform at scale.
ProxLB - The Intelligent Workload Balancing Solution for Proxmox Clusters
credativ GmbH OSS Virtualization Gathering
Mönchengladbach, Germany – August 2025
ProxLB is an advanced load-balancing solution designed specifically for Proxmox VE clusters, addressing the lack of a native Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS) that many users know from VMware environments. As a third-party tool, ProxLB enhances cluster efficiency by intelligently distributing virtual machine workloads across available nodes.
The talk explains how ProxLB evaluates different workload characteristics such as memory pressure, CPU usage, disk utilization, and VM placement to prevent overprovisioning and ensure balanced resource usage. Real-world cluster challenges and operational considerations are discussed to highlight why traditional static placement often falls short in long-running Proxmox environments.
A key advantage of ProxLB is its fully open-source and free nature, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, and contribute to the project. ProxLB also supports fine-grained control by allowing administrators to include or exclude specific nodes and virtual machines via configuration files and API calls, enabling highly customized balancing strategies tailored to individual cluster requirements.
Proxmox Cluster Fully Automated
Virtualization Meetup
Düsseldorf, Germany – July 2025
In this session, I present a comprehensive Proxmox Cluster fully automated by gyptazy by deploying a complete
Proxmox VE Cluster through end-to-end automation. The demonstration covers the entire lifecycle — from initial bare-metal provisioning to operational virtual machines — without any manual interaction or graphical user interface input.
Attendees will gain insight into how Proxmox VE can be fully automated to initialize a new cluster, integrate additional nodes, and seamlessly connect to external storage systems such as NetApp NFS (v4.2). The workflow also supports alternative backends including iSCSI, CephFS, or other storage technologies, ensuring flexibility across diverse environments by modules I recently wrote for Ansible.
The presentation further explores automated Proxmox Backup Server integration and the use of Proxmox SDN (Software-Defined Networking) to configure VLAN-based networks — for example, isolated production and development segments. Throughout the talk, the Proxmox web interface serves as a live visualization of the automated processes taking place in the background.
In the final stage, guest virtual machines are provisioned automatically across the cluster, fully utilizing the configured networking and storage layers. All used automation has been made public available as open-source by gyptazy and can be reused.
Introducing BoxyBSD: Crafting a non-profit VPS Hosting Platform for Beginners
BSD Cafè
Bologna, Italy – Jun 2024
In this talk, I present my project BoxyBSD, a non-profit and community-driven VPS hosting platform created to make BSD-based operating systems accessible to beginners, students, and researchers. The idea behind BoxyBSD grew out of a common problem: gaining practical experience with systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD often requires dedicated hardware, complex initial setups, or financial resources that many newcomers simply do not have.
I explain the motivation and core design goals of BoxyBSD and show how the platform offers free virtual machines and shell accounts for anyone who wants to explore BSD in a real, hands-on environment. The talk covers the main service features, including IPv6-based VPS instances with guaranteed resources, and demonstrates how BoxyBSD lowers the entry barrier for learning system administration, networking, and operating system fundamentals without relying on proprietary solutions.
In addition, I discuss the practical realities of running a non-profit open-source hosting platform, such as handling limited resources, preventing abuse, and operating a reliable service for a diverse user base. By the end of the session, attendees gain a clear understanding of how BoxyBSD supports education, experimentation, and community growth, and how they can make use of or contribute to the project themselves.