VMware Alternative and Migration: Post-Migration Performance Validation and System Stability Assessment

Following Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the comprehensive implementation of a subscription-based model has caused significant industry impact, particularly bringing higher IT costs. According to Gartner predictions, by 2028, cost issues will prompt 70% of enterprise VMware customers to migrate 50% of their virtual workloads.

Therefore, migrating from VMware to other platforms has become something many enterprises are doing or researching. However, successfully completing the migration is only the first step. What truly measures the effectiveness of the migration is the performance and stability of the system post-migration. This article will explore in depth virtual machine performance validation and system stability assessment after migration, and introduce how to ensure continuous and efficient business operation through rigorous testing and intelligent management.

Virtual machine migration involves not only data relocation but also the reintegration and optimization of the entire IT infrastructure. In this process, ensuring that post-migration performance does not degrade but improves, while maintaining high system stability, is the core demand of all enterprise users. Effective performance validation and stability assessment can help enterprises identify potential bottlenecks, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately provide a solid and reliable operating environment for core businesses.

Post-Migration Performance Validation: Quantitative Assessment of Business Load Capacity

After virtual machine migration is completed, performance validation is the primary task. This is not just a simple operational check, but a systematic, multi-dimensional performance evaluation process.

Processor (CPU) Performance Verification

After migration, enterprise users need to verify whether the CPU resource allocation for virtual machines is reasonable and whether their processing capacity meets expectations. By monitoring metrics such as CPU utilization and context switching frequency, one can determine if CPU resources are sufficient. High-efficiency virtualization platforms, like the ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform, through their high-performance characteristics, aim to ensure that virtual machines can achieve computing power close to that of physical machines, thereby supporting various compute-intensive applications.

Memory Performance Considerations

Memory is a critical resource for virtual machine operation. Verifying whether memory allocation is appropriate, and whether there are memory leaks or overutilization, is crucial for ensuring seamless system operation. Continuously monitoring memory usage and page swapping activities can help detect and resolve memory-related issues in a timely manner.

Storage I/O Performance Deep Analysis

Storage I/O performance directly affects application response speed and data processing efficiency. Conducting storage read/write performance tests on migrated virtual machines, including metrics such as IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second), throughput, and latency, is a core part of validating their business load capacity. High-performance distributed storage solutions, such as ZStack SDS distributed storage, through innovative technologies like vhost+RDMA, can achieve outstanding storage performance, reaching million-level IOPS random read/write capabilities.

Network Performance Testing

Network performance is the cornerstone for ensuring communication efficiency between virtual machines and with external systems. Testing network bandwidth, latency, packet loss rate, etc., ensures that the post-migration network configuration can meet business requirements. ZStack Cloud supports high-performance network technologies, such as SR-IOV and OVS-DPDK, which can significantly enhance scenarios where virtual machines have high demands on network performance.

System Stability Assessment: Ensuring Business Continuity

Meeting performance standards is the foundation, while system stability is the guarantee of continuous business operation.

Uptime and Availability Guarantee

Continuously monitoring the uptime and service availability of virtual machines is a direct way to assess system stability. An ideal virtual machine environment should have a High Availability (HA) mechanism that can automatically migrate virtual machines to healthy physical/virtual machines when a single component fails, minimizing business interruption time. ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform possesses features such as management service HA, network HA, virtual machine HA, virtual machine failure detection, and business failure detection, enabling automatic fault recovery and ensuring high reliability.

Error Logs and Exception Monitoring

System and application logs are valuable resources for discovering potential problems. Regularly reviewing error logs, warning messages, and using automated tools for exception monitoring can help operations teams intervene before issues affect business. ZStack Cloud provides comprehensive monitoring and alerting services, supporting multiple channel push notifications, such as Microsoft Teams, email, SMS and other general alert scenarios.

End-to-End Application Functionality Testing

Ultimately, all technical indicators should serve the upper-layer applications. Conducting end-to-end functional tests to verify that all business processes run normally on the migrated virtual machines is the final step in confirming stability. This includes simulating user behavior, executing key business processes, and ensuring the user experience is unaffected.

Resource Utilization Trend Analysis

Long-term observation of resource utilization trends of virtual machines after migration helps to detect hidden performance degradation or resource waste. By analyzing historical data, future resource needs can be predicted, and planning can be done in advance to avoid stability problems caused by insufficient resources.

Validation and Assessment Tools: Achieving Intelligent Operations

To efficiently complete the above validation and assessment work, reliance on a series of professional tools and methods is necessary. In addition to standard performance testing tools, a unified cloud management platform is crucial.

ZStack Cloud provides intelligent unified operations functionality, supporting unified management of cloud platforms, virtual machines, and bare metal. Its built-in monitoring and alerting, operation logs, and one-click inspection features can help enterprises fully grasp the platform’s operational status and quickly locate and resolve problems. For virtual machine migration, ZStack supports V2V and agentless seamless migration, enabling seamless VMware to ZStack migration.

ZStack: Let Every Company Have Its Own Cloud

ZStack is a company committed to becoming a provider of fundamental software in the era of intelligent computing. The ZStack Cloud product matrix comprehensively covers data center cloud infrastructure, providing diverse product lines including virtualization, cloud platforms, container cloud platforms, distributed storage, hyper-converged appliances, cloud-native hyper-convergence, multi-cloud management platforms, and database cloud platforms.

ZStack occupies a leading position in the cloud computing market. According to the IDC “China Cloud System Software Market Tracking Report,” ZStack ranks among the top five in the market and is the number one independent cloud vendor. This is attributed to its self-developed technology route, which does not rely on any open-source cloud products for secondary development, possessing complete technical documentation, intellectual property rights, and source code.

Facing the arrival of the artificial intelligence era, ZStack launched a new generation of AI software infrastructure—the ZStack AIOS platform. As an AI Infra platform, it can achieve unified management of different CPU architectures and GPU virtualization at the computing power layer, promoting innovation and diversified development in the virtualization market. The ZStack AIOS platform aims to decouple heterogeneous computing power and model ecosystem silos, optimize AI application performance, and achieve global metering and billing to promote AI self-service, thereby accelerating the adoption rate of enterprise AI applications.

ZStack has served customers in more than 30 countries and regions worldwide, winning the trust of over 4,000 enterprise customers and having 1000+ VMware-to-ZStack migration cases. Its characteristics of rapid installation and deployment (completing overall cloud platform deployment in 30 minutes) and one-click seamless upgrade (without stopping virtual machines, business uninterrupted) greatly simplify IT operations for enterprise users.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: After virtual machine migration, how to determine if performance has decreased?

A: After virtual machine migration, you can compare key performance indicators such as CPU utilization, memory usage, storage I/O read/write speed, and network throughput before and after migration. If these indicators show a significant decrease, or if application response times become longer, there may be performance issues. ZStack Cloud/ZStack ZSphere provides monitoring functions to help you continuously track these indicators.

Q: What measures can be taken to ensure data security during virtual machine migration?

A: Ensuring data security during virtual machine migration is crucial. It is recommended to take multiple measures, such as performing a complete data backup before migration, using encrypted channels for data transmission, enabling data consistency checks during migration, and verifying data integrity after migration. ZStack Cloud supports agentless backup and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) functions, ensuring the security and integrity of data before and after migration.

Q: After migrating virtual machines to the ZStack ZSphere platform, how to use its features to improve operational efficiency?

A: After migrating virtual machines to the ZStack ZSphere platform, users can utilize its barrier-free user experience, intelligent unified operations, and rich visual management functions to improve efficiency. ZStack ZSphere is fully comparable to the VMware virtualization platform, retains user-familiar operating habits, and provides functions such as batch resource management and one-click report export to simplify daily operations.

Q: Does ZStack support virtual machine migration for multiple architectures?

A: Yes, ZStack Cloud’s ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform has powerful compatibility, supporting multi-architecture environments such as x86 and non-x86 (e.g., ARM), and can manage VMware virtualization resources, achieving unified management of virtual machine migration in various heterogeneous environments.

Q: If system instability issues are encountered after virtual machine migration, how does ZStack provide support?

A: If system instability issues are encountered after virtual machine migration, ZStack provides 7×24 remote technical support and on-site services. Its technical team can assist with troubleshooting, log analysis, and provide professional operational suggestions to ensure quick business recovery and long-term stable operation.