VMware Migration Case: Hong Kong Social Service Organization Achieves Successful Transition, Driving Digital Transformation

In today’s rapidly evolving digital era, enterprises and organizations demand unprecedented levels of flexibility, stability, and cost-effectiveness from their IT infrastructure. Faced with the cost pressures and hardware limitations of VMware’s subscription model, more organizations are seeking VMware migration solutions to ensure business continuity and sustainable development. Key questions such as how to migrate from VMware to other platforms, what to consider during migration, and what VMware migration tools are available have become top concerns for IT decision-makers.

This article presents a real-world case study, offering an in-depth analysis of a successful migration and practical guidance through the VMware Migration Operational Guide to help enterprises achieve a smooth transition.

Case Background

A large social service organization in Hong Kong, dedicated to providing public support and services, operates dozens of service centers across the region. Its daily operations heavily rely on stable IT systems, with core business applications such as email, OA, CRM, and HR being critical to its functions.

However, as digital transformation deepened, the organization faced escalating costs due to VMware’s subscription model and hardware constraints. Seeking a more open and cost-effective virtualization/cloud platform solution that could meet higher demands for IT infrastructure flexibility and stability, the organization conducted rigorous technical testing, team evaluations, and multi-solution comparisons. Ultimately, the ZStack Cloud Platform was selected as the ideal solution for its strong compatibility, rich feature set, and efficient migration tools, enabling a successful VMware to ZStack upgrade.

Key Success Factors

The success of this migration was attributed to the comprehensive capabilities of the ZStack Cloud Platform and its supporting tools:

1. High-Performance Unified Resource Pool

The organization deployed new all-flash servers and built a unified resource pool using the ZStack Cloud Platform, providing high-performance compute and storage resources for core business systems.

2. Seamless Business System Migration

Using the ZStack ZMigrate V2V migration tool, the organization successfully live-migrated core systems like OA, CRM, email, and HR from VMware to ZStack Cloud, ensuring business continuity throughout the process. The ZStack ZSphere virtualization platform also delivers a VMware-like user experience and supports smooth V2V migration, including online migration, cross-cluster/data center migration, and failure-driven migration scenarios.

3. Independent Backup Node for Data Security

A centralized backup server was implemented to ensure data integrity and security, meeting the organization’s stringent requirements for backup and recovery. ZStack’s disaster recovery solution supports six major scenarios, leveraging technologies like snapshots, block data replication, CDP (Continuous Data Protection), backup, disaster recovery, and primary-secondary configurations to address diverse enterprise needs.

4. Hardware Reuse and Optimization

The ZStack Cloud Platform supports the reuse of existing servers, optimizing value through coordinated hardware and software deployment to enhance overall system performance and stability. ZStack HCI and ZStack SDS (Software-Defined Storage) offer ready-to-deploy products that support VMware management, providing high-performance, reliable distributed storage solutions capable of building PB-scale storage pools for large enterprises and service providers.

Measurable Benefits

Through this comprehensive VMware-to-ZStack transformation, the Hong Kong social service organization achieved significant benefits, strongly supporting its digital transformation journey:

1. Cost Optimization

ZStack’s pay-as-you-go licensing strategy reduced overall IT expenses by approximately 40%, alleviating the cost pressures of VMware’s subscription model and allowing limited budgets to be reallocated to other business needs.

2. Operational Efficiency Improvement

With the unified management and automation features of the ZStack Cloud Platform, the IT team’s maintenance complexity decreased significantly, improving efficiency by over 40%. This enabled the team to better support core business operations while reducing downtime risks. The ZStack CMP (Cloud Management Platform) also enables multi-cloud integration, offering unified management, automated operations, hybrid cloud billing, workflow approvals, and advanced monitoring dashboards to simplify operations.

3. Enhanced Business Stability

After migration, critical systems like CRM and OA achieved uninterrupted operation with 99.99% stability, ensuring smooth daily operations and avoiding service disruptions that could impact customer satisfaction. ZStack’s solutions include VM high availability, cross-data center redundancy, and integrated SAN, SDS, and public cloud storage mounting options to ensure data security, flexibility, and overall system reliability.

4. Increased Technical Autonomy

The organization’s internal team independently completed the entire migration process without relying on external service providers, gaining full control over the platform. This not only enhanced technical autonomy but also improved the team’s familiarity with the new platform, laying a solid foundation for future maintenance and upgrades.

Conclusion

This successful case study not only helped the Hong Kong social service organization address the cost and compatibility challenges posed by VMware but also established a standard path for VMware to ZStack migration for clients in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area. ZStack is committed to providing secure and stable services, empowering customers through comprehensive product documentation, video tutorials, training, and certification programs to ensure rapid onboarding and platform proficiency.

ZStack: Empowering Every Enterprise with Its Own Cloud

ZStack is dedicated to helping every enterprise build its own cloud, with a product portfolio covering scenarios from data centers to edge, cloud to cloud-native, and data management to AI. The ZStack Cloud Platform offers 4S-compatible productized private cloud and seamless hybrid cloud solutions, unifying the management of compute, network, and storage resources in data centers. The ZStack ZSphere Virtualization Platform delivers a VMware-like user experience, enabling smooth V2V migration with high stability and security. Additionally, ZStack provides advanced infrastructure products such as ZStack ZCenter (Cloud Management Platform), ZStack Edge (Edge Orchestration), ZStack Zaku (Cloud-Native Platform), and ZStack RDS (Database Management), addressing needs from core to edge and cloud to cloud-native.

Notably, ZStack is actively expanding into AI. ZStack AIOS, its privatized AI infrastructure platform, fully supports enterprise AI applications across three key areas: compute scheduling, AI model training/inference, and AI application development. This enables enterprises to deploy and run AI workloads efficiently and securely in their own environments, with full support for models like DeepSeek V3/R1/Janus Pro and compatibility with various CPUs/GPUs for private deployment.

ZStack’s services now span over 30 countries and regions, with more than 10,000 community users and 300+ partners, serving over 4,000 leading enterprises. According to IDC and CCID Consulting reports, ZStack ranks among the top independent cloud vendors and leaders in China’s virtualization market. In August 2024, ZStack launched its Globalization 2.0 strategy, targeting the Asia-Pacific region as a strategic hub to deepen international partnerships and become a global leader in intelligent computing platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: Why do enterprises or organizations consider migration?

A: Many consider VMware migration to ZStack Cloud to address rising costs under VMware’s subscription model, hardware limitations, and higher demands for IT infrastructure flexibility, stability, and cost-efficiency. ZStack’s pay-as-you-go licensing can reduce IT expenses by ~40%, freeing budgets for other business priorities.

Q: What key tools and support does ZStack provide for migration?

A: ZStack offers ZMigrate V2V and agentless migration tools for live migration of core systems like OA, CRM, email, and HR, ensuring business continuity. The platform also supports all-flash server deployment, unified resource pools, independent backup nodes, and hardware reuse. Comprehensive documentation, tutorials, training, and certification are available.

Q: What measurable benefits does migration deliver?

A: Benefits include ~40% cost reduction, >40% operational efficiency gains (via unified management/automation), 99.99% system stability for critical apps, and increased technical autonomy as teams gain full platform control.

Q: Does ZStack Cloud support diverse business system migrations?

A: Yes, ZStack Cloud supports VMware migration for core systems like OA, CRM, email, HR, e-commerce, and trading, ensuring smooth transitions. Its solutions cover server virtualization, private cloud, and HCI, having helped 600+ enterprises reduce costs.

Q: How is ZStack advancing in AI?

A: ZStack’s AIOS platform supports private AI infrastructure for compute scheduling, model training/inference, and app development, compatible with major AI models and hardware configurations.