croit

croit sells a management layer for Ceph rather than a Ceph fork, which is the detail that matters most: the underlying cluster stays 100% open-source Ceph, so nothing about adopting croit locks a customer into a proprietary storage format. The web interface handles cluster bring-up, OSD and node management, monitoring and updates, cutting the time to a running cluster from days of command-line work to, by croit's own account, minutes.

As an official Proxmox Gold Partner, croit's second business is VMware-to-Proxmox migration itself: architecture design, a documented migration plan and managed support for the cut-over, on top of the storage layer Proxmox needs underneath it.

It also resells official Proxmox VE, Backup Server and Mail Gateway subscriptions directly. Pricing for the Ceph management platform is capacity-based, from about $600 a month for 100TB down to a lower per-terabyte rate near 1PB; separate Ceph support plans start near $500 a month for the same 100TB baseline.

croit GmbH has operated from Munich since its 2017 registration, under German and EU jurisdiction. The trade-offs: this is a management and migration layer rather than a from-scratch hypervisor platform, so it is worth choosing specifically for Ceph and Proxmox rather than as a general VMware exit, and capacity-based pricing means cost tracks storage growth rather than a flat subscription.

What croit does well

• Unmodified, standard open-source Ceph underneath
• Official Proxmox Gold Partner for VMware migrations
• Cluster bring-up in minutes rather than days
• Capacity-based pricing that scales with storage
• German company under EU jurisdiction

Where croit falls short

• Management layer, not a hypervisor of its own
• Only useful once Ceph is the storage choice
• Pricing rises with capacity rather than staying flat
• Smaller company than the Ceph vendors it competes with

Standout feature. A GUI over standard Ceph plus an official Proxmox partnership — the migration project and the storage layer from one Munich vendor.