VMware to ZStack Capability Analysis: Reuse of Infrastructure

Amid the wave of enterprise digital transformation, an increasing number of businesses are reevaluating their virtualization platform choices, with a growing demand to migrate from VMware to other platforms. What should enterprises consider when transitioning from VMware to another platform? How can migrating to ZStack achieve cost optimization and efficient resource utilization? What are the operational guidelines and tools for VMware migration? These questions trouble many IT managers. As a robust virtualization platform, ZStack offers exceptional hardware compatibility and Reuse of Infrastructure capabilities, providing enterprises with a smooth migration path. This article delves into how ZStack leverages Reuse of Infrastructure to facilitate the transition from VMware to ZStack, maximizing the use of existing hardware resources, reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), and ensuring business continuity and high availability. Whether you are seeking VMware migration tools or aiming to optimize your IT architecture, ZStack’s solutions are worth exploring.

A common yet often overlooked issue is that a significant amount of existing infrastructure resources remain underutilized. According to IDC’s 2023 data, up to 43% of enterprise server resources have a utilization rate below 30%. A survey by Uptime Institute, an international data center certification organization, also found that 30% of servers in the U.S. are in a “comatose” state, meaning they have not provided service information or computing services for six months or longer. Globally, this resource waste has resulted in losses exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars.

In this context, “Reuse of Infrastructure” (Reuse of Infrastructure) is no longer merely a cost-saving measure but is evolving into a critical path for balancing technological innovation with business pragmatism and practicing sustainable development. Through advanced technologies such as intelligent scheduling algorithms and hybrid cloud orchestration, seemingly outdated physical servers, traditional storage arrays, and even out-of-warranty network devices can be revitalized, gaining a “second life curve” and continuing to deliver value to enterprises.

Drawing from its experience serving over 600 customers who have transitioned from VMware to ZStack, ZStack has observed that nearly every customer’s infrastructure exhibits a complex mix of multiple brands and generations of hardware. How to maximize the utilization of these aging infrastructures is a core concern for all customers considering a migration to a new platform like ZStack. Therefore, providing effective Reuse of Infrastructure capabilities has become a “must-answer” question for IT service providers when addressing customer needs.

1. Core Challenges and Requirements for Reuse of Infrastructure

Enterprises face multiple challenges in pursuing IT modernization and cost reduction through Reuse of Infrastructure:

Pain Points of Current Enterprise IT

• High Server Resource Idle Rates: As mentioned earlier, IDC data shows that 43% of enterprise server resources have a utilization rate below 30%. For example, a new retail enterprise procured high-end GPU servers to handle peak promotional events but found their idle rate reached 76% during regular operations. Such inefficiencies lead to significant resource waste and unnecessary cost expenditures.
• Increased Operational Complexity Due to Multi-Brand, Cross-Generation Hardware: Over time, enterprise IT construction results in data centers housing servers, storage, and network devices from different brands and generations. Managing these heterogeneous hardware systems, each with distinct management methods, significantly increases the complexity and workload for operations teams.
• Conflict Between Hardware Upgrade Cycles and Business Continuity Needs: Hardware lifecycles and upgrades are inevitable, but traditional hardware upgrades often require downtime for maintenance, which conflicts with the high availability and continuity requirements of critical business systems.

Key Requirements for Reuse of Infrastructure

To effectively achieve Reuse of Infrastructure, an excellent cloud platform or virtualization solution must possess the following core capabilities:

• Cross-Brand Compatibility: The ability to manage devices from different hardware vendors, breaking down brand barriers.
• Unified Management of Cross-Generation Hardware: The capability to integrate servers and storage devices from different generations into a single management platform for centralized control.
• Resource Pooling and Scheduling: The ability to pool heterogeneous and mixed-generation hardware resources and allocate them on-demand through intelligent scheduling algorithms to improve overall resource utilization.

2. ZStack ZSphere’s Reuse of Infrastructure Technical Architecture

As the core virtualization platform of ZStack, ZSphere provides robust technical support for Reuse of Infrastructure, designed to address the characteristics of complex, heterogeneous enterprise IT environments.

Hardware Compatibility Design

ZStack ZSphere boasts extensive hardware compatibility, which is the foundation for Reuse of Infrastructure. It supports mainstream server, storage, and network equipment brands such as DELL, HP, HUAWEI, Inspur, CISCO, NetApp, and H3C. More importantly, it is compatible with CPUs from different generations, such as Intel from Ice Lake to Arrow Lake and AMD from Zen1 to Zen4. This broad and deep compatibility enables enterprises to retain and utilize existing hardware investments to the greatest extent, avoiding the need for large-scale hardware replacements. Users can visit ZStack’s compatibility list for more detailed information.

Heterogeneous Resource Pooling Engine

ZStack ZSphere’s heterogeneous resource pooling engine can uniformly manage computing resources of different architectures, including X86, ARM, and even non-X86 chipsets in a mixed pool. Through its powerful resource pooling capabilities, ZStack integrates new and old hardware resources of different types into a virtual resource pool for unified allocation and scheduling. Its built-in intelligent load balancing algorithm accounts for performance differences in underlying hardware, preventing old equipment from becoming a bottleneck for overall performance and ensuring smooth business operations.

Hardware Acceleration Optimization

To further enhance the performance of aging hardware, ZStack ZSphere provides a series of hardware acceleration optimization technologies. It improves the virtualization efficiency of older CPUs. Additionally, through support for GPU passthrough and hybrid virtualization modes, ZStack can reactivate retired or idle GPU-equipped servers, enabling them to contribute to scenarios like AI inference and breathing new life into legacy hardware.

Common Questions (FAQs)

Q1: How does ZStack reduce the total cost of migrating from VMware to ZStack through Reuse of Infrastructure?
A: ZStack enables enterprises to integrate existing multi-brand, cross-generation servers, storage, and network devices into its cloud platform without requiring hardware replacement, maximizing resource utilization. This eliminates the substantial upfront costs of large-scale new hardware procurement during the transition, significantly lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO). Additionally, improved resource utilization reduces operational costs.

Q2: Are my old servers, storage, and network devices compatible with the ZStack platform for Reuse of Infrastructure?
A: ZStack ZSphere is designed with robust hardware compatibility, supporting mainstream brands such as DELL, HP, HUAWEI, and Inspur, as well as CPUs from different generations. We recommend visiting ZStack’s official compatibility list (https://www.zstack-cloud.com/compatibility-list/) to check if your specific device models are supported or contacting ZStack experts for detailed consultation.

Q3: How does ZStack ensure high availability and stability for existing business systems after migrating from VMware?
A: ZStack ZSphere delivers the high reliability and stability required for financial-grade core transaction systems. The platform provides comprehensive self-healing mechanisms, including management service HA, network HA, virtual machine HA, and fault detection at both the virtual machine and application layers. These mechanisms ensure rapid recovery and continuous operation of business systems even during underlying hardware failures, guaranteeing business continuity.

Q4: Beyond Reuse of Infrastructure, in what areas does ZStack outperform VMware?
A: In addition to its significant advantages in Reuse of Infrastructure, ZStack offers a highly productized solution with simple and rapid deployment, supporting setups starting with just one physical machine. It has a low operational threshold, providing a fully graphical interface and rich API interfaces to simplify daily management. It supports seamless one-click upgrades without business interruption. The platform’s architecture is robust and stable, supporting power outage recovery. Additionally, ZStack follows an independent innovation cloud computing approach, supporting heterogeneous domestic innovation environments.

Conclusion

In the pursuit of digital efficiency and cost-effectiveness, Reuse of Infrastructure has become a critical component of enterprise IT strategies. With its ZSphere virtualization platform, designed specifically for complex heterogeneous environments, ZStack offers powerful hardware compatibility, heterogeneous resource pooling, and hardware acceleration optimization capabilities. This enables enterprises to efficiently leverage existing IT assets during the transition from VMware to ZStack, significantly reducing TCO.

ZStack has demonstrated its ability to improve resource utilization, simplify operations, and ensure high availability and stability through numerous successful cases. For enterprises aiming to upgrade their IT architecture and achieve cloud transformation while controlling costs, ZStack is a reliable and proven solution for transitioning from VMware to ZStack.

Want to know if your existing hardware can be revitalized with ZStack? Click to learn more about ZStack’s compatible products: https://www.zstack-cloud.com/compatibility-list/