ZStack Selected as a Representative Vendor in the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms

Recently, Gartner released its 2025 Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms report. ZStack was listed as a representative vendor we believe thanks to the outstanding technological capabilities of its virtualization platform ZSphere and its extensive global deployment practices.

The report points out that “the server virtualization market is facing the most significant disruption in decades. Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has reignited the server virtualization market’s competitive landscape.” Gartner forecasts that “by 2028, cost concerns will drive 70% of enterprise-scale VMware customers to migrate 50% of their virtual workloads.” According to the research: “disruption is being driven by customer concerns about increases in the total cost of ownership, the quality of support and changes to product roadmaps with limited perceived benefit.” As a result, many organizations are now looking for reliable vendors capable of providing a comprehensive alternative solution.

As a cloud infrastructure software provider for the intelligent computing era, ZStack is committed to delivering a digital and intelligent computing platform for global users. Its comprehensive product portfolio covers intelligent computing center infrastructure software, including cloud platforms, virtualization, distributed storage, hyper-converged infrastructure, container cloud platforms, cloud management platforms, database cloud platforms, and the AI infrastructure platform . ZStack serves more than 4,000 enterprise customers across 30+ countries and regions worldwide.  

In VMware replacement scenarios, ZStack is committed to providing enterprise users with 100% core scenario substitution, 50% lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and worry-free migration through its products, solutions, and services. ZStack’s VMware replacement deployments have achieved over 1,000 successful cases worldwide.  

Among them, the ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform, as a key alternative to VMware vSphere, continues to gain global recognition and popularity for its open architecture, exceptional performance, and significant cost advantages.

Strong hardware compatibility: IT supports multiple brands, models, and generations of servers, as well as integration with centralized storage, helping enterprises reduce hardware vendor dependency and lower TCO in VMware replacement scenarios.

Highly scalable deployment: It can scale flexibly from a single server to clusters of up to 1,000 servers, supporting cross-version hot upgrades to meet enterprise needs for gradual VMware replacement and application expansion.

Familiar user experience: It offers a product experience similar to vSphere, along with comprehensive migration tools and a broad global software and hardware ecosystem. This allows enterprise IT personnel to deploy and operate the platform without additional training, ensuring a seamless and worry-free migration from VMware to ZStack.

In addition,，Many server virtualization platforms provide a software-defined storage capability commonly known as a hyper-converged infrastructure or HCIS for appliances. Gartner emphasizes that A fundamental decision point for many I&O teams is whether the solution only supports a hyperconverged storage solution，or whether it can use external storage and what external storage providers and protocols it supports.

The ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform supports both distributed and centralized storage, enabling deployments in either compute-storage separation or hyper-converged modes. It supports a variety of storage protocols, such as local storage,block storage (iSCSI / FC / RBD / NVMe-oF), and file storage (NFS / CIFS / GPFS ),and allows live migration of virtual machines across different primary storage types, including distributed primary storage to SAN primary storage, local storage to SAN primary storage, and local storage to distributed primary storage. With unified storage capabilities, it enables users to build an open, flexible, efficient, and future-ready unified storage resource platform, helping users choose suitable storage protocols and types based on business needs to optimize performance and cost efficiency of their storage systems.

In enterprise data centers, the ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform enables an integrated solution combining virtualization, containers, and bare metal, balancing application architecture flexibility with system stability and enhancing IT operation efficiency. For AI application scenarios, it also supports heterogeneous GPU virtualization and unified management of NVIDIA, Ascend, Hygon, Enflame, and MetaX , providing an AI infrastructure platform for large model training and inference.

Gartner, Market Guide for Server Virtualization Platforms, 23 October 2025

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