Globalization 2.0 | Hong Kong Educational Institution Powers Seamless VMware-to-ZStack Transition with ZStack ZSphere

A non-profit educational institution in Hong Kong, was facing significant challenges with its IT infrastructure. With the advancement of smart education and a surge in operational demands, the client faced mounting pressure on its Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) due to recurring VMware licensing and maintenance fees. Some of its services were still running on legacy physical servers and a VMware architecture with inadequate performance and scalability, posing risks of single points of failure (SPOF). The heterogeneous environment of physical servers and VMware across different campuses resulted in complex operations and maintenance (O&M) and long resource delivery cycles, making it difficult to respond quickly to the needs of its smart education initiatives. The institution urgently needed to build an open, elastic, and continuously evolving virtualization foundation to support innovative services such as virtual simulation teaching and digital academic management.

ZStack ZSphere was chosen for its distinct advantages: a high-availability design featuring cross-version live upgrades, highly elastic deployment scaling from a single server to thousands in one cluster, high compatibility for repurposing existing servers and integrating with centralized storage, and a user experience consistent with VMware, which lowers the learning curve. Additionally, ZStack’s strong partner ecosystem provided localized V2V migration services, which ultimately helped facilitate a seamless business migration.

The customer chose ZStack ZSphere to implement VMware to ZStack, and successfully migrated innovative businesses such as virtual simulation teaching and digital educational management from the VMware virtualization platform to the ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform through the ZStack ZMigrate V2V migration tool, while reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO), improving operational efficiency and business stability. ZStack ZSphere utilizes existing servers and SAN storage to improve resource utilization .

Implementation Plan

The implementation plan was centered around two key objectives: VMware-to-ZStack, hardware repurposing.

• Hardware Repurposing: Leveraged existing x86 servers and centralized storage (FC-SAN) to avoid redundant investments.
• Unified Management of Heterogeneous Resources: Utilized the ZStack ZSphere platform to centrally manage physical servers and the VMware environment from a single control plane.
• Multi-Tenant Self-Service Portal: Allowed different research departments to independently access and request resources on demand.
• V2V Live Migration: Used the ZStack ZMigrate tool to migrate virtualized workloads from the VMware platform to ZStack ZSphere, ensuring business continuity.
• Cross-Datacenter Disaster Recovery (DR): Implemented agentless DR software for virtual machine backup and recovery between two ZStack ZSphere clusters.

Customer Benefits

• Optimized Resource Utilization: Achieved efficient use of existing hardware and enhanced resource scheduling capabilities. Total IT costs were reduced by 37%, with the savings reinvested to build three new research labs.
• Simplified O&M: The unified control plane significantly reduced the complexity of managing a cross-platform environment.
• Faster Resource Delivery: ZStack’s self-service features improved responsiveness to academic and research needs. The deployment cycle for new services was reduced from 21 days to just 7 days.
• High-Availability Architecture: Eliminated single points of failure (SPOF) between campuses, ensuring high availability for teaching and research applications. The elastic architecture can support a future VR training platform for tens of thousands of users.