How Playtonic Games modernized its infrastructure with XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra
About Playtonic Games
Playtonic Games is an independent game studio with a compact but highly technical team. Their virtualized environment supports development pipelines, internal services, testing workflows and day-to-day collaboration. VMware was the default choice… until it wasn’t.
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Why leave VMware?
During our conversation with Tim, Playtonic Games’ IT Systems Manager, he shared what pushed the studio to look beyond VMware.
In a previous role, VMware had been the default virtualization stack for many years. When Tim joined Playtonic, he introduced only a small amount of VMware usage as part of a broader modernization effort. The idea was simple: move away from large Debian physical servers running many services toward smaller VMs, each dedicated to a single function.
The project began using the free version of ESXi, but halfway through, VMware’s licensing changes and Broadcom’s removal of the free hypervisor forced a pivot.
Rising licensing costs, removal of the free ESXi version, and a vendor direction that no longer matched their needs.
From there, the studio began evaluating alternatives: familiar tools, testable without upfront cost, running well on commodity hardware, and ideally part of an open-source ecosystem.
Discovering Vates & the VMS Stack
Their first contact with XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra came through the open-source community. What made the difference was how natural the transition felt.
XCP-ng + XO felt close enough to VMware to be adopted quickly.
This familiarity allowed them to evaluate the stack thoroughly and confidently, without retraining or redesigning everything from scratch.
“The XCP-ng + XO setup felt very similar to VMware, which meant I could get productive very quickly.”
Migration: progressive and controlled
Originally, eight VMs had been migrated into VMware as part of the physical-to-virtual (P2V) project. When VMware changed direction, Playtonic pivoted before that project was complete.
Playtonic Games migrated the 8 VMs that had been moved into VMware before the pivot, and then continued the P2V project directly on the Vates stack.
Tests were first carried out on older commodity hardware. Once validated, the team moved production workloads.
Tools used included Clonezilla and the VMware import workflow in Xen Orchestra.
Warm migrations were not possible, but this didn’t block the process.
“I started with tests on old commodity hardware and the results were good enough that I was confident moving production workloads.”
What improved after switching
Once the migration was complete, the improvements were immediately noticeable:
- better VM performance
- greater deployment flexibility
- a cleaner, more robust infrastructure
- a structured backup workflow for critical services
- the ability to quickly launch test systems or scale specific functions (e.g. expanding upload servers, deploying a resilient VPN server)
Better performance, simpler operations, and more freedom to design the infrastructure they wanted.
The new setup now supports the studio’s work more efficiently, without the overhead and constraints of their previous platform.
“Better performance and greater flexibility were noticeable almost immediately after switching.”
A platform aligned with their way of working
XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra didn’t just replace VMware, they enabled Playtonic Games to build the environment they actually needed.
Open-source values, transparency, community engagement and freedom from lock-in were strong factors in their decision.
“I made the switch to XCP-ng and haven’t had any regrets.”
Collaboration with Vates
Their experience with Vates teams has been very positive, highlighting responsiveness, community presence and the value of their support subscription.