VMware to ZStack Virtual Machine Migration Load Testing Practice for High-Concurrency Business Scenarios

Original VMware enterprise users, facing the sales strategy adjustments made by Broadcom after its acquisition of VMware, have made migrating existing virtual machines from VMware to a new cloud environment a common requirement. However, in high-concurrency business scenarios, ensuring a smooth migration process, data integrity, and uninterrupted business continuity poses significant challenges for IT teams. Therefore, virtual machine migration testing, especially load testing, is crucial for validating the new platform’s capacity and the effectiveness of the migration plan.

This article will introduce considerations for virtual machine migration load testing in high-concurrency scenarios when migrating from VMware to a new platform.

Migration Path and Key Considerations

When planning a migration from an existing virtualization environment to a new cloud platform, enterprises need to thoroughly evaluate multiple key factors to ensure a smooth transition and successful implementation. This includes ensuring data integrity, application system compatibility in the new environment, seamless network configuration switching, performance during the migration process, and minimizing business downtime. ZStack Cloud, as an advanced cloud platform, is designed to manage computing, storage, and network resources within data centers and provides flexible and comprehensive API interfaces, enabling enterprises to rapidly build intelligent cloud data centers or create flexible cloud usage scenarios.

When evaluating migration paths from existing platforms to new platforms like ZStack, several common strategies exist:

• Virtualization Platform Replacement: Suitable for enterprises with limited budgets, high dependency on existing infrastructure, need for rapid migration completion, high requirements for data security and compliance, and strict demands on performance and control. The ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform offers a user experience consistent with mainstream virtualization platforms in terms of functionality and interface, providing a zero-barrier user experience, reducing learning costs, and featuring high stability. It covers over 95% of full lifecycle management functions for virtual machines and further enhances operational efficiency and security through integrated features like security groups (east-west firewalls).
• Cloud Platform Upgrade: Enterprises can choose to deploy a private cloud platform like ZStack Cloud for a more comprehensive upgrade. This approach suits users with high data security and compliance requirements, complex and highly customized existing IT architectures, a focus on long-term cost-effectiveness, need for high control and self-management, and strict demands for high performance and low latency.
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Replacement: Hyper-Converged Architecture (HCI) integrates computing, storage, and network resources through software-defined methods, providing highly integrated and simplified IT infrastructure. The ZStack Cube hyper-converged appliance falls into this category, helping enterprises simplify IT management, improve resource utilization, reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), and provide high availability and rapid scalability.
• Container Cloud Platform Replacement: ZStack Zaku Container Service Platform fully covers the container service capabilities of VMware Tanzu. It not only enables VMware-to-ZStack migration but also deeply integrates with ZStack Cloud’s fundamental components (compute/network/storage/security) through a pluggable architecture, shielding the complexity of container technology, simplifying user operations and maintenance, enabling unified login/tenant/resource quota/authorization management, and providing enterprise-grade features like multi-cluster management, resource quotas, CI/CD, microservices governance, GPU management and scheduling, disaster recovery backup, and operational management, helping enterprise users build self-sufficient, controllable enterprise-grade cloud-native platforms.

Virtual Machine Migration Operations and Tools

Migrating virtual machines from an existing platform to a new one typically involves various methods. ZStack Cloud provides multiple services to support this process, such as V2V migration services. This service supports both online (hot) and offline (cold) migration methods and allows for first managing existing virtualization resources before performing V2V migration, or directly executing V2V migration. The entire migration process can be monitored and managed through an intuitive visual interface.

At the tool level, migration can be performed using the following methods:

• OVF Template Import: Package the virtual machine into an OVF format template and import it for deployment on the new platform.
• P2V (Physical-to-Virtual) Migration: Convert data and applications on physical servers into virtual machines.
• V2V (Virtual-to-Virtual) Migration: Directly migrate existing virtual machines to the target platform. ZStack‘s V2V migration service supports agentless replication of the existing environment, efficiently copying virtual machine data through a transfer machine and the VADP interface. This agentless approach reduces the intrusion risk to customer operations.

Load Testing Practice in High-Concurrency Scenarios

In high-concurrency business scenarios, virtual machine migration testing must not only verify functionality but also conduct rigorous load testing to ensure that post-migration business performance is unaffected or even improved. Load testing simulates actual user or system requests to evaluate system performance under high pressure.

The practical steps for load testing typically include:

1. Develop a Test Plan: Define test objectives, scope, scenarios (e.g., migration of many small VMs, migration of a few large VMs, concurrent migrations), expected results, and success criteria.
2. Collect Baseline Performance: Before migration, collect performance metrics (CPU, memory, I/O, network latency, etc.) for key businesses and virtual machines on the source platform to serve as a baseline for subsequent comparison. The cloud monitoring functionality of ZStack Cloud can provide management node monitoring, performance analysis, capacity management, and alerting services, helping users fully understand the operational status of the cloud environment.
3. Simulate High-Concurrency Migration: Use automation tools to simulate the concurrent migration of a large number of virtual machines while continuously applying pressure to business applications on both the source and target ends, simulating real high-concurrency traffic.
4. Performance Monitoring and Analysis: Continuously monitor various performance metrics of the source platform, migration tools, target platform, and business applications during migration. Pay special attention to storage I/O, network bandwidth, CPU utilization, and memory consumption. ZStack Cloud’s monitoring and alerting functions can visualize resource utilization in real-time and support extended alert messages for timely notification of abnormalities. The platform also provides one-click inspection functionality to help quickly diagnose problems and provide operational suggestions.
5. Rollback Strategy Verification: Test whether, in the event of migration failure or failure to meet performance standards, a quick rollback to the source platform according to the predefined rollback strategy is possible, ensuring business continuity. ZStack Cloud is designed with a workflow engine where every step is rollback-capable, ensuring garbage resources can be cleaned up if errors occur.
6. Result Evaluation and Optimization: Compare performance data before and after migration, analyze bottlenecks, and adjust migration strategies, resource configurations, or platform settings based on test results. For example, ZStack Cloud supports adjusting advanced VM settings like CPU mode, CPU binding, and vNUMA configuration through System Tags to optimize virtual machine performance.

Through rigorous load testing, enterprises can effectively identify potential risks, optimize migration plans, and thereby ensure that virtual machines can be migrated smoothly and efficiently to the new cloud platform, even in high-concurrency business scenarios.

ZStack: Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud

ZStack, founded in 2015, is committed to becoming a leading global infrastructure software provider in the era of intelligent computing, with the mission of “Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud”. ZStack is ranked among the TOP 5 in IDC’s Cloud System Software Market Report and holds the number one position among independent cloud vendors. ZStack’s product matrix comprehensively covers data center cloud infrastructure, including virtualization, cloud platforms, container cloud platforms, distributed storage, hyper-converged appliances, cloud-native hyper-convergence, multi-cloud management platforms, and database cloud platforms.

Currently, ZStack serves over 4,000 enterprise users in more than 30 countries and regions worldwide, with over 1,000 cases of VMware-to-ZStack migration. It can provide VMware-to-ZStack migration paths for enterprise users through virtualization, enterprise cloud, container cloud, and HCI.

ZStack has also built the next-generation AI software infrastructure, the ZStack AIOS platform, focusing on AI to decouple heterogeneous computing silos, optimize AI application performance, and achieve global metering and billing, aiming to accelerate the penetration rate of enterprise AI applications. Due to the outstanding performance of ZStack AIOS, ZStack has been listed by Gartner as a representative vendor in China’s AI Infra landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: Why is virtual machine migration testing necessary in high-concurrency business scenarios?

A: In high-concurrency business scenarios, virtual machine migration involves massive data transfer and system resource scheduling, which can impact business continuity and performance. Load testing simulates real high-pressure environments, identifies potential bottlenecks and risks, ensures a smooth migration process, and verifies that the new platform can meet business performance requirements.

Q: What key performance indicators should be focused on during virtual machine migration testing?

A: During virtual machine migration testing, key focus should be on CPU utilization, memory consumption, storage I/O (especially read/write bandwidth and latency), network bandwidth utilization, and application response time. These metrics directly reflect the impact of the migration process on system performance.

Q: What conveniences does ZStack Cloud provide for virtual machine migration testing?

A: ZStack Cloud provides a visual management interface supporting online and offline V2V migration services, including agentless replication. Its built-in monitoring and alerting system can track performance data in real-time and supports extended alert information. Furthermore, ZStack Cloud’s elastic architecture and workflow rollback mechanism also provide a robust foundation for migration testing.

Q: Which tools can assist virtual machine migration testing when migrating from VMware to ZStack?

A: ZStack provides P2V and V2V migration services, supports OVF template import, and agentless replication of VMware environments through a transfer machine and the VADP interface. These productized migration tools and intuitive visual UI interface greatly simplify the migration process and test validation.

Q: How to optimize performance issues found during virtual machine migration testing?

A: After identifying performance issues, locate the bottleneck based on monitoring data, for example, by adjusting virtual machine configuration (CPU cores, memory size, disk I/O policy), optimizing network paths, or adjusting storage capacity and type. ZStack Cloud supports adjusting advanced settings like CPU binding, vNUMA configuration, and QoS services for VMs through System Tags to achieve performance optimization.