Medialine Group
Building a sovereign, MSP-grade cloud platform for the Medialine CompanyCloud on Proxmox with MultiPortal.
"From this high level, you see that the ceiling is a lot higher. The basic quality of the software and the use cases we can achieve with MultiPortal and Proxmox are at such a high quality that we can just use it. This will be a very good and very prosperous partnership."
Andreas Becker, Head of Managed Services, Medialine Group
About the Medialine Group
The Medialine Group is one of Germany's most established managed service and cloud providers. Founded in 1999 by Martin and Stefan Hörhammer, the Group has grown from a two-person operation into a full-service IT provider spanning roughly 20 locations across Germany, Austria, Romania and Spain, with a dedicated engineering hub in Bucharest.
The Group operates seven owned data centres across Germany, Austria and Romania, all certified to ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, with Frankfurt and Bucharest at the heart of the European footprint. Medialine also operates its own ISP backbone across this footprint, giving the Group network-layer control that most cloud providers do not have. Services are delivered under German data protection law, making Medialine the natural home for customers who need genuinely sovereign infrastructure.
At the heart of the Group's managed services portfolio is the CompanyCloud, Medialine's own cloud brand, originally launched in 2006. CompanyCloud is the productised platform under which the Group delivers IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, SaaS, hybrid cloud and managed services to more than 650 customers, from regional German SMBs through to large enterprises running production SAP estates, and to white-label partners reselling under their own brand.
The Group also operates specialist subsidiaries including Medialine Communications (Voice and Unified Communications) and Cyberdyne (secure IT for small and medium-sized businesses), each delivering services from the same shared platform.
Customer Snapshot
| Company | Medialine Group |
| Cloud brand | CompanyCloud |
| Industry | Technology · Managed & cloud services |
| Region | Germany, Austria, Romania, Spain |
| Data centres | 7 owned across Germany, Austria and Romania |
| End customers | ~300 tenants planned on the new platform |
| MultiPortal plan | Enterprise |
Environment at a Glance
| Capability | Pre-Migration | Post-Migration with MultiPortal |
|---|---|---|
| Hypervisors | VMware vSphere, Azure Stack Hub, Hyper-V, Nutanix (legacy) | MultiPortal Enterprise as the multi-tenancy, white-label and billing layer |
| Multi-tenancy | VMware vCloud Director | Proxmox VE in HCI mode with Ceph storage |
| Networking | VMware NSX-T software-defined networking | EVPN over VXLAN, Fortinet VDOMs for per-tenant security |
| Footprint | 3 data centres, 7 clusters, mostly IaaS workloads | Veeam, Commvault, Proxmox Backup Server |
| Partners | — | Dell (storage/compute), Arista (network), Fortinet (security), Veeam (backup) |
Headline Outcomes
Business Drivers
The Medialine Group serves a wide spread of customers through CompanyCloud: price-sensitive regional German businesses, large enterprises running production SAP estates, and white-label partners reselling Medialine cloud services under their own brand. A single hypervisor platform could not economically serve every segment in that customer base.
The VMware licensing model, especially post-Broadcom, made it impossible to match hyperscaler pricing for smaller tenants. At the same time, vCloud Director had become heavy to operate for the simple multi-tenant use cases that dominate the Group's MSP business.
Medialine also wanted to reduce its dependency on US-controlled software and answer growing customer demand for genuinely sovereign cloud services across the EU.
What Needed to Change
- ● Bring per-tenant cost down to a level that competes with public cloud for SMB workloads on CompanyCloud.
- ● Keep full multi-tenancy, white-label branding, metered billing and per-tenant licensing in one product, with no functional step back from vCloud Director.
- ● Reduce day-two operational overhead from a heavy orchestration suite.
- ● Build a sovereign EU-anchored cloud stack alongside the Group's existing VMware and Azure business.
"Our technicians installed MultiPortal in half an hour on a test environment. We had so many features out of the box and could even do a basic branding. It was a little bit mind-blowing."
— Andreas Becker, on the internal POC
Migration Experience
Medialine ran a structured, low-risk rollout: internal POC at the annual technical summit, followed by a controlled beta in Bucharest (where tenant density is lower than in Frankfurt), before scaling into the larger German data centres.
In Bucharest, roughly 70–80% of in-scope VMs are already migrated and running on the new Proxmox cluster orchestrated by MultiPortal. A separate customer is being moved directly from Azure Stack Hub onto the platform.
How It Was Executed
- ● Proof-of-concept on a single Proxmox host, including out-of-the-box white-label branding in MultiPortal.
- ● Beta rollout in the Bucharest data centre with Proxmox VE in HCI mode using Ceph as the storage layer.
- ● VM migration using built-in VMware import plus scripts, supplemented by MultiPortal's new migration tooling (alpha).
- ● Performance testing of the HCI/Ceph design to baseline behaviour before production cutover.
The hypervisor migration itself was straightforward. The real engineering effort was in the network: replacing NSX-T with an EVPN/VXLAN fabric and per-tenant Fortinet VDOMs to deliver the same isolation and security model customers had before.
"Moving the VMs is straightforward and very easy. The difficult part was the network. We had to break up our NSX-based SDN and build a whole new EVPN with VXLANs and Fortinet VDOMs for tenancy."
— Andreas Becker
Results & Benefits
Even early in the rollout, the operational and commercial picture is clear. MultiPortal gives Medialine exactly the feature set CompanyCloud needs, without the surface area of a legacy orchestration suite.
Lower day-two operational load
MultiPortal is lightweight to keep up to date compared with vCloud Director. Less management overhead, fewer moving parts.
The right feature set, nothing more
Multi-tenancy, white-label branding, billing and per-tenant access are all delivered in one product, without the bloat of an enterprise suite.
Faster onboarding of small tenants
Medialine's in-group brands, Medialine Communications (Voice and Unified Communications) and Cyberdyne (secure IT for small and medium-sized businesses), can now spin up small, standardised tenants with far less overhead than they had in vCloud Director.
API-first automation roadmap
Automation that was painful to build against vCloud Director's API is expected to be materially easier on MultiPortal.
"MultiPortal is more lightweight than the big vCloud Director. You have a lot of things in that big software package that you don't really use, but you still have to operate them. The management overhead to keep MultiPortal up to date is just not that big."
— Andreas Becker
Cost & ROI
The commercial case is the headline story. Medialine has modelled the new platform against a like-for-like VMware deployment using a representative multi-host, multi-year customer engagement, including energy, rack space, connectivity and operations.
On a like-for-like workload, the combined Proxmox subscription plus MultiPortal licensing comes in at a small fraction of equivalent VMware VCF licensing. Savings of around two thirds, in line with what the Group is seeing across the wider modelling exercise.
Across the platform overall, Medialine's monthly licensing footprint on the new stack is roughly a third of what it was on the previous one.
Where the Savings Come From
- ● Materially lower hypervisor and orchestration licensing costs vs. VMware VCF + vCloud Director.
- ● MSP-friendly commercial model: Medialine can scale licensing up or down with real customer demand rather than being locked into rigid multi-year commitments.
- ● Reduced operational overhead on the orchestration layer means engineering hours redirected to customer-facing work.
- ● New revenue streams unlocked through CompanyCloud: lightweight tenants for small and medium-sized businesses via Cyberdyne, and standardised communications tenants via Medialine Communications.
Medialine has been transparent about the trade-off: Proxmox HCI with Ceph carries a higher raw-to-usable storage ratio than the team's previous vSAN footprint, so some hosts have been topped up with additional disks. The licensing savings comfortably absorb that cost.
"Overall monthly licensing is about a third of what it was, and the model is MSP-friendly, so we can plan a lot better. We're not bound to rigid multi-year contracts. We can adjust to real customer growth."
— Andreas Becker
Strategic Value
MultiPortal on Proxmox is not a wholesale replacement for VMware at the Medialine Group. It is the sovereign, MSP-grade pillar in a deliberately multi-hypervisor strategy that also retains VMware, Azure Stack and Hyper-V for the workloads that need them.
That mix lets Medialine give every CompanyCloud customer the right home: hyperscaler-style price points for SMB tenants on Proxmox, certified platforms (SAP, regulated workloads) on VMware, and hybrid setups where Azure customers run disaster recovery or scale-out workloads inside Medialine data centres, all under one operating model, one billing system, and one geo-redundant German and EU data centre footprint.
The sovereignty story matters commercially. Proxmox originates in Austria. MultiPortal sits outside the classical US software stack. For German and EU customers asking hard questions about where their data lives and who controls the software running it, CompanyCloud now has a clean answer.
The Joint Message to Market
- ● A sovereign, EU-anchored alternative to legacy US-owned cloud orchestration, without sacrificing features.
- ● Production-grade quality from day one, with a clear roadmap (migration tooling, additional hypervisor integrations) being shipped, not just promised.
- ● A platform built for MSPs and service providers: multi-tenancy, white-label, billing and per-tenant licensing are core, not bolt-ons.
Andreas' Advice to Other Service Providers
"Look at your whole environment, not just the hypervisor. The biggest challenge is your networking stack. If you're deep into NSX-T, that's where your real vendor lock-in is. The lesson from Broadcom and VMware is that no single vendor will give you everything for the next 15 years. Build an infrastructure where you can swap hypervisors, automate as infrastructure-as-code, and stay resilient. That starts with the network, runs through the hypervisor, and ends with the orchestration platform on top."
"We see from the excellence in software quality, and from a continuous improvement that is really shipped and not only promised, that this will be a very good and a very prosperous partnership."
— Andreas Becker, Head of Managed Services, Medialine Group
About MultiPortal
MultiPortal is a multi-tenancy orchestration platform for Proxmox VE, purpose-built for service providers and enterprises that need full provisioning, metering, billing and white-label tenancy in a single product. MultiPortal gives service providers a sovereign alternative to vCloud Director in the post-Broadcom market, without forcing them off VMware where it still makes sense.
Get in touch with us
To learn more about how MultiPortal can support your platform, get in touch with us at hello@multiportal.io